To give a chess comparison again, it barely ranks above winning a chess game against your high school's prom queen. Ok, ok, a little higher than that, but not by much.
Dude, a 9 stone is huge advantage. But you've got to reckon that playing a 8-dan pro with 9 stones is far from being a "won" game.
Basically, the only thing the stupid algorithm knows about Go is the simple rules and how to score the board. It knows nothing of strategy, tactics, strong shapes, living shapes, dead shapes, etc. Of course, it may be doing some sophisticated analysis to determine fruitful branches so as to not waste time on bad ones, but that doesn't defeat my point
Monte Carlo doesn't mean random walk with every direction having the same weight. Monte Carlo integration methods only work exactly because how it samples only the "meaningful" part of the Configuration Space (google for the Ising model using Monte Carlo for a simple, and visualizable example).
The core concept here being that in a Monte Carlo walk, you do add a smart dynamic to sample choices but you also take the "wrong" choice from time to time according to a probability. That's what makes the whole thing work.
The stuff you quote like knowledge of (Go) shapes, tactics and strategy were probably exactly what this program used (well) to guide it's walk. So knowledge about the game is what makes this machine capable to cut out so much of the (intractable!) search space in order to actually be able to take meaningful samples.
I still haven't u what we need Ubuntu for. We have Debian. Granted, not that trendy but it works.
Except that
stable releases took 2 / 3 years to happen
that manners were often lacking at Debian mailing lists.
Debian didn't really strive to simply "work out of the box".
On the topic of working out of the box:
the installation process was NOT newbie friendly, and stopped short of setting many useful stuff by default (this was a long time ago but -- why couldn't it simply detect which device was handling the mouse?)
everyone (with experience) knew that the boot time would get much faster by using ash/dash, but that never became a default...
the mentality when reaching a difficult point was often to let it, in the name of security, unconfigured by default (user belonging to audio groups -- but how many users would actually solve that right? (Mandrake had gotten that right *years* before...))
did you ever read that scary 'charset for the "less" pager' configuration question during installation? I had years as a SysAdmin when I faced that for the first time, and had no clue of what exactly was being asked. For a novice, it would be the confirmation of everything they feared about Linux.
often the cause of the lack of a setting was not even
They often avoided a difficult (political or technical) decision and left it to the user. Who was supposed to "know better what to do", or to read and study in order to take any decision. Increasing the dedication necessary to run the system.
In short, Debian//never// went own to produce a system for someone who wasn't, at least, a hobbyist UNIX sysadmin.
Sure, many of these points are probably much better now, but this was surely the context that made Ubuntu a welcomed offering.
The greatest plague of modern computing is complexity. Debian tackles a whole world of it through its dependency work, testing, and dpkg/APT. But they still (leave?) left way too much unnecessary complexity into the system.
Add to that the fact that the European web-market for bargains is terribly fragmented due to:
The different languages;
the fragmentation of the delivery market that makes prices for shipping across many national borders much higher than what it should, say in the US you often get single fee for continental US, but here you get single fee for... Belgium or The Netherlands!
My netbook purchase is also on hold, but it is more due to the fact that I am still waiting for:
a netbook that will take a mobile phone sim card for web access.
to know if Asus actually brings the SplashTop to the Eee line,
IMHO both the Dell's and this Lenovo look much better than the Eee's, but that SplashTop would (for me) be the killer feature.
But given the speed with which these new models seem to reach Europe. I'll probably won't be actually getting one before December (when the West celebrates the Great Shopping Holiday:-S).
Anyway, I've used reusable bags for a long time but I do think there are unanswered questions about them. The biggest thing is how much energy and waste does one reusable bag use compared with a paper or plastic bag disposed of through various means - e.g., through recycling, reuse as trash bags (even my environmentally-moronic roommate picked up that idea), or just as plain old trash?Most of my other questions rely on the answer to those questions.
Mod parent up!.
When visiting the London Technical Museum (or whatever is the name) I saw some stuff about disposable against reusable goods.
A figure I remember was the natural resources needed to produce a small "backed clay" coffee mug (thus reusable) were ~600x that of producing a (small) plastic coffee cup. So that you needed to re-use that clay mug some 600x in order to match the plastic mug, and that wasn't counting the resources used to wash the clay mug after every use.
I am sorry to go against your illusions about The Netherlands.
I don't know if that's actually illegal here or not, but after moving to Rotterdam (from Groningen btw), and being unable to find a place to dump glass, and other kinds of waste at a walking distance from my house, I tried searching on the city web pages for the closest point. Couldn't find any. They list only major locations far, far, far away.
I called them at this phone number. The lady said:
Get your car, and take them to...
Long story short: after telling them I did not have a car, and needed a place at a 15min walking distance, I was told I there was no such a place in the city center, and that I should simply dump my glass in the regular trash.
There are a lot of people living in the center of Rotterdam, but no underground trash disposing.
It may be illegal to throw these things in the trash, but even in the center of major cities in the NL, there is often no infrastructure to separate the trash, and the city gov. itself will tell you to trash everything together.
Now imagine if it manages to hit some 2% of all PCs / Symbians in the US?
Ok, it doesn't need to actually "brick it" in the most strict sense. A virus that corrupts the BIOS to the point you need to have special cables to reflash it would suffice.
Consider Quickbooks for example, even if there were a f/oss equivalent that was just as good, or better:
Just to add a counter argument to your (very good) arguments:
* If there was a F/OSS equivalent, and if the quality of it was that high, it would perhaps be already installed in my Linux box.
Many people use a certain program, think Web Browser, not because it is the best, but because it is the one that they found pre-installed in their computer.
The command line in Unix is more "usable" because it is older, more mature,
has more features and flexibility, and is more easily extensible.
And also because all these Computer Science / Physics / Engineering graduates that argue how easy is to get things done with a shell so conveniently forget the amount of time they dedicated to learn how to use a shell.
I am personally (much) more comfortable using zsh than any GUI for manipulating files, or other tasks. But what most people tend to forget is that there is a much larger pool of users that are not willing to memorize 200 commands, and read man pages for days and days in order to just use their computer.
I use Debian based for more than ???, oh, well, too long.
Debian used to cost me too much time to set-up, so I have been using Kubuntu; but Kubuntu is.... "not a good distribution" (i.e. a piece of s***).
Is there a decent, relatively up-to-date, Debian based distro for running KDE? I *really* need to stop using Kubuntu, and would like to avoid having to chose between a Debian system, and KDE.
Can you provide a screenshot for comparison for what a decent default font should look like in your opinion?
(This is not a flame! I do use KDE mind you!)
I am not the OP, but if you want to see what decent fonts look like google for a Ubuntu (Gnome) screen shoot.
Here is an anecdote for you:
As a full-time KDE user, when I bought a computer for my parents (1 year ago) I installed Kubuntu on it. Since Kubuntu has been such a mess in the last year, upon my last visit, I installed Ubuntu on that computer.
My mother (~60 years old, has no clue whatsoever about what KDE or Gnome are) upon being presented to what I called a new Linux flavor, said, spontaneously, within some 5 seconds looking at the Gnome menus:
The fact is that the costs of goods production (more often than not) do not bear any resemblance to the actual sale price. Goods are sold by the price people are willing to pay for it.
That so many people believe that prices are set based on production costs is, IMHO, a major shortcoming of modern education programs.
I often use the camera of my phone to take pictures of text (whenever written in fonts large enough) when I need to take note of something.
Much easier than actually taking a note somewhere.
I did this when I was walking down the neighborhood searching for a flat to rent, and just today when looking for a digital cameras at a shop (so that I could check reviews on the internet about the actual quality of each camera model).
My *cough* humble *cough* opinion is that the video is crap.
This guy can't stop talking about how people doing "research-like" work won't be please by a e-reader. They demonstrate that by showing this guy reading a double-column mini-letter size paper.
Pretty obvious, if you ask me. E-readers are handy, but not for reading tasks that very fast require navigation. Specially of double column pdf files (that would be the equivalent of what the guy was handling). For stuff like that a large LCD monitor on vertical stand does the job much better. Or simply print the dawn thing.
Their proposed solution is to have 2(!) small screens, which are even harder to flip pages than hitting a large round button like in most e-readers (mine is a el cheapoHanlin v3)
You know, I've been waiting for a good while for OpenMoko to leave alpha stage, and start shipping units actually meant to be used as modern phones, instead of just meant to be "hacked upon at low level". I used to check their pages every week, now I do it every 2 months or so.
In my dictionary the word for a proprietary project that promises and doesn't deliver is vaporware. Regardless of the reasons for not shipping. Incidentaly, the word for a OSS project that promises and doesn't deliver is also vaporware.
So OpenMoko will be open hardware, with free software. So what? So is my laptop. Guess what? I can't use neither of them as a full replacement for the (cheap) mobile phone I currently have.
All the code in the world is useless until I can actually change the software on my phone and make it do what I want and not what some phone company thinks I should and shouldn't be able to do. As far as I am concerned, all outstanding promises of freedom by OpenMoko are useless if the project never actually releases.
(Oh, and please, don't get me wrong. I would have already bought an open moko phone had they left the alpha stage.)
Speaking of RSS... Does anyone knows of a decent off-line RSS reader for Linux? It would be nice to have something like that for days I sit longer in the train.
About the feeds, here are the ones I read the most (I guess almost all are self-descriptive for slashdot reader's).
As for KDE, well you could just apt-get install it... I would like to respectfully disagree. That simply doesn't work in such a simple way.
The system integration of KDE in Ubuntu is poor if compared to Ubuntu's. Many applications just use Gnome's default settings instead of KDE's.
The *whole* system of/etc/mailcap, and/etc/alternatives is hard-wired to prefer Gnome instead of KDE. So if you ever install a single Gnome alternative to a KDE program, MIME will point to the Gnome app, and not to KDE's.
Other than that there is the fact that Kubuntu breaks KDE far too often. Riddel (responsible for Kubuntu at Cannonical) is (IMHO) not exactly very cautious when modifying the system, and there is a lack of extensive testing of KDE (as compared to Gnome) in Ubuntu. So the end result, IMHO, lacks much of the polish that Gnome gets.
For the people, who are going to suggest me to fill in bugs: I do report as many bugs as I can.
Slashdot Mirror
To give a chess comparison again, it barely ranks above winning a chess game against your high school's prom queen. Ok, ok, a little higher than that, but not by much.
Dude, a 9 stone is huge advantage. But you've got to reckon that playing a 8-dan pro with 9 stones is far from being a "won" game.
Basically, the only thing the stupid algorithm knows about Go is the simple rules and how to score the board. It knows nothing of strategy, tactics, strong shapes, living shapes, dead shapes, etc. Of course, it may be doing some sophisticated analysis to determine fruitful branches so as to not waste time on bad ones, but that doesn't defeat my point
Monte Carlo doesn't mean random walk with every direction having the same weight. Monte Carlo integration methods only work exactly because how it samples only the "meaningful" part of the Configuration Space (google for the Ising model using Monte Carlo for a simple, and visualizable example).
The core concept here being that in a Monte Carlo walk, you do add a smart dynamic to sample choices but you also take the "wrong" choice from time to time according to a probability. That's what makes the whole thing work.
The stuff you quote like knowledge of (Go) shapes, tactics and strategy were probably exactly what this program used (well) to guide it's walk. So knowledge about the game is what makes this machine capable to cut out so much of the (intractable!) search space in order to actually be able to take meaningful samples.
I still haven't u what we need Ubuntu for. We have Debian. Granted, not that trendy but it works.
Except that
On the topic of working out of the box:
They often avoided a difficult (political or technical) decision and left it to the user. Who was supposed to "know better what to do", or to read and study in order to take any decision. Increasing the dedication necessary to run the system.
In short, Debian //never// went own to produce a system for someone who wasn't, at least, a hobbyist UNIX sysadmin.
Sure, many of these points are probably much better now, but this was surely the context that made Ubuntu a welcomed offering.
The greatest plague of modern computing is complexity. Debian tackles a whole world of it through its dependency work, testing, and dpkg/APT. But they still (leave?) left way too much unnecessary complexity into the system.
Thanks for the tip, I will actually try to find it.
this is the distro used in acer low end notebooks, no X, just a black screen. Great for presenting a Windows alternative!.
and I would take that anyday instead of paying for XP / Vista.
Please, note that Dell is only selling Linux pre-installed in "selected" markets...
Here in The Netherlands it's impossible to get the Linux version of the eee pc 901.
Did you actually found the Eee 901 for sale in the NL already? (Just asking because I haven't seen it anywhere).
IMHO both the Dell's and this Lenovo look much better than the Eee's, but that SplashTop would (for me) be the killer feature.
But given the speed with which these new models seem to reach Europe. I'll probably won't be actually getting one before December (when the West celebrates the Great Shopping Holiday :-S).
Anyway, I've used reusable bags for a long time but I do think there are unanswered questions about them. The biggest thing is how much energy and waste does one reusable bag use compared with a paper or plastic bag disposed of through various means - e.g., through recycling, reuse as trash bags (even my environmentally-moronic roommate picked up that idea), or just as plain old trash?Most of my other questions rely on the answer to those questions.
Mod parent up!.
When visiting the London Technical Museum (or whatever is the name) I saw some stuff about disposable against reusable goods.
A figure I remember was the natural resources needed to produce a small "backed clay" coffee mug (thus reusable) were ~600x that of producing a (small) plastic coffee cup. So that you needed to re-use that clay mug some 600x in order to match the plastic mug, and that wasn't counting the resources used to wash the clay mug after every use.
I don't know if that's actually illegal here or not, but after moving to Rotterdam (from Groningen btw), and being unable to find a place to dump glass, and other kinds of waste at a walking distance from my house, I tried searching on the city web pages for the closest point. Couldn't find any. They list only major locations far, far, far away.
I called them at this phone number. The lady said:
Get your car, and take them to...
Long story short: after telling them I did not have a car, and needed a place at a 15min walking distance, I was told I there was no such a place in the city center, and that I should simply dump my glass in the regular trash.
There are a lot of people living in the center of Rotterdam, but no underground trash disposing.
It may be illegal to throw these things in the trash, but even in the center of major cities in the NL, there is often no infrastructure to separate the trash, and the city gov. itself will tell you to trash everything together.
What could possibly count as a cyber 9/11?,
Now imagine if it manages to hit some 2% of all PCs / Symbians in the US?
Ok, it doesn't need to actually "brick it" in the most strict sense. A virus that corrupts the BIOS to the point you need to have special cables to reflash it would suffice.
Consider Quickbooks for example, even if there were a f/oss equivalent that was just as good, or better:
Just to add a counter argument to your (very good) arguments:
* If there was a F/OSS equivalent, and if the quality of it was that high, it would perhaps be already installed in my Linux box.
Many people use a certain program, think Web Browser, not because it is the best, but because it is the one that they found pre-installed in their computer.
"If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse."
You may like to ponder that in the light of that statement you made.
Didn't Henry Ford also say: "They can have any color they want as long as its black"?
Henry Ford also said: "Excuse me, I need to use the bathroom".
Neither of these two quotes, however, alter the value of the reasoning behind the original quote on "faster horses".
The command line in Unix is more "usable" because it is older, more mature, has more features and flexibility, and is more easily extensible.
And also because all these Computer Science / Physics / Engineering graduates that argue how easy is to get things done with a shell so conveniently forget the amount of time they dedicated to learn how to use a shell.
I am personally (much) more comfortable using zsh than any GUI for manipulating files, or other tasks. But what most people tend to forget is that there is a much larger pool of users that are not willing to memorize 200 commands, and read man pages for days and days in order to just use their computer.
I use Debian based for more than ???, oh, well, too long.
Debian used to cost me too much time to set-up, so I have been using Kubuntu; but Kubuntu is.... "not a good distribution" (i.e. a piece of s***).
Is there a decent, relatively up-to-date, Debian based distro for running KDE? I *really* need to stop using Kubuntu, and would like to avoid having to chose between a Debian system, and KDE.
Can you provide a screenshot for comparison for what a decent default font should look like in your opinion?
(This is not a flame! I do use KDE mind you!)
I am not the OP, but if you want to see what decent fonts look like google for a Ubuntu (Gnome) screen shoot.
Here is an anecdote for you:
As a full-time KDE user, when I bought a computer for my parents (1 year ago) I installed Kubuntu on it. Since Kubuntu has been such a mess in the last year, upon my last visit, I installed Ubuntu on that computer.
My mother (~60 years old, has no clue whatsoever about what KDE or Gnome are) upon being presented to what I called a new Linux flavor, said, spontaneously, within some 5 seconds looking at the Gnome menus:
Oh, the fonts are much beter
The fact is that the costs of goods production (more often than not) do not bear any resemblance to the actual sale price. Goods are sold by the price people are willing to pay for it.
That so many people believe that prices are set based on production costs is, IMHO, a major shortcoming of modern education programs.
Here is a good text by Joel talking about market segmentation and software pricing: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckies.html
I don't like this terminology but it appears that the scientific community technical term for it is brain fart.
No, I am not proud but I have to assume doing it.
Much easier than actually taking a note somewhere.
I did this when I was walking down the neighborhood searching for a flat to rent, and just today when looking for a digital cameras at a shop (so that I could check reviews on the internet about the actual quality of each camera model).
It is still in coming soon status at http://openmoko.com/
This guy can't stop talking about how people doing "research-like" work won't be please by a e-reader. They demonstrate that by showing this guy reading a double-column mini-letter size paper.
Pretty obvious, if you ask me. E-readers are handy, but not for reading tasks that very fast require navigation. Specially of double column pdf files (that would be the equivalent of what the guy was handling). For stuff like that a large LCD monitor on vertical stand does the job much better. Or simply print the dawn thing.
Their proposed solution is to have 2(!) small screens, which are even harder to flip pages than hitting a large round button like in most e-readers (mine is a el cheapo Hanlin v3)
You wanna a glimpse to the future of (affordable) e-books just look at these images: http://www.jinke.com.cn/Compagesql/embedpro/futurepro.asp
I don't suppose you read that it's currently in the initial production run, and is supposed to go on sale in a week or two?
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Community_Updates
I hadn't read it. Glad to hear it.In my dictionary the word for a proprietary project that promises and doesn't deliver is vaporware. Regardless of the reasons for not shipping. Incidentaly, the word for a OSS project that promises and doesn't deliver is also vaporware.
So OpenMoko will be open hardware, with free software. So what? So is my laptop. Guess what? I can't use neither of them as a full replacement for the (cheap) mobile phone I currently have.
All the code in the world is useless until I can actually change the software on my phone and make it do what I want and not what some phone company thinks I should and shouldn't be able to do. As far as I am concerned, all outstanding promises of freedom by OpenMoko are useless if the project never actually releases.(Oh, and please, don't get me wrong. I would have already bought an open moko phone had they left the alpha stage.)
About the feeds, here are the ones I read the most (I guess almost all are self-descriptive for slashdot reader's).
The system integration of KDE in Ubuntu is poor if compared to Ubuntu's. Many applications just use Gnome's default settings instead of KDE's.
The *whole* system of /etc/mailcap, and /etc/alternatives is hard-wired to prefer Gnome instead of KDE. So if you ever install a single Gnome alternative to a KDE program, MIME will point to the Gnome app, and not to KDE's.
Other than that there is the fact that Kubuntu breaks KDE far too often. Riddel (responsible for Kubuntu at Cannonical) is (IMHO) not exactly very cautious when modifying the system, and there is a lack of extensive testing of KDE (as compared to Gnome) in Ubuntu. So the end result, IMHO, lacks much of the polish that Gnome gets.
For the people, who are going to suggest me to fill in bugs: I do report as many bugs as I can.