You could try the OmniWeb Beta, it indexes the sites you have in your history (btw. there is a search framework in Panther that you could use to build something like this yourself)
See it as an overview of the possibilities of AI
on
When Things Start to Think
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
My grandfather once gave me a copy of this book. Being interested in what I do learning Artificial Intelligence he also read it. He found it clarifying the possibilities of AI and IT in general a lot. Him not having the slightest experience with computers generally would mean that it's not so interesting for someone deeper into the subject.
But while it's true that the book doesn't get really technical and left me wondering for a lot of the details, the enthusiastic way it's written and the really original projects that are described make it a really nice read. It's really motivating and can help the known problem of having learned a programming language and not having the slightest clue what to program in it.
I think that when you don't see it as a computer book but as reading material for a holiday the book deserves more than a 5. Borrow it from someone and read it, it's not like it'll take a lot of time.
Please let not forget about those small robots, the design and contest goals are quite different for the small/medium league versus the humanoid league. If I'm not mistaken one of the contests in the humanoid league is standing on 2 feet for an amount of time (ok.. it's the first year for the humanoid league but come on this doesn't look really spectacular), so this league is mostly about designing humanoid robots and writing software for moving them around without falling.
The small and medium size leagues are a lot more about designing distributed systems of autonomous agents and letting them sort out good strategies for play. I think the non humanoid leagues will be much nicer to look at for some years to come and forgetting about them will make a game of robotsoccer even harder to watch (watching one of those games still consists of waiting for a long time looking at robots that decided they better like it standing still.)
Contrary to what RMS says in the article about the free software foundation not being able to use bitkeeper (since they don't want any non-free software on their computers) and therefore having to depend on another to put the kernel source in CVS or to create a free implementation of BitKeeper, in an article about the history of the GNU project he comes to the conclusion he should allow himself to use non-free software in order to create a free implementation of it.
UNIX was (and is) proprietary software, and the GNU project's philosophy said that we should not use proprietary software. But, applying the same reasoning that leads to the conclusion that violence in self defense is justified, I concluded that it was legitimate to use a proprietary package when that was crucial for developing free replacement that would help others stop using the proprietary package.
Hmmm.. can't say i'm really disappointed seeing XBOX sales being lower than expected for two reasons (the first being the obligated microsoft bashing one). Ain't it the case that microsoft really, really wants to push XBOX sales in order to get a firm grip on consumer electronics (selling services and home-entertainment being the direction they want to direct their company)?
If so they could consider lowering the price of their machine, possibly up till an amount lower than the cost of manufacturing it (they have the cash and want to get into the market, not sure whether the machine is already cheaper than the cost of manufacturing it). If they do so it would be a nice platform to get to build your own home-entertainment device (divx playing, mp3s, etc. Probably no TIVO like stuff sinds i don't think has TV in... damn)
It would be a really good idea to make clustering easier, but there is a trade-off between easiness and performance. Making the creation of clusters easy ("a few G4 Macs, some Ethernet cables, a hub and the Pooch software.") by only talking about the easy-to-use software and not optimized network topology (correct me if i'm wrong but the Beowulf handbook probably covers a lot of that) will definitely keep performance quite low.
BTW. on the wired site it says:
"Dauger added that Linux clusters are extremely fragile: If all the machines in the cluster aren't running the same version of the kernel, everything grinds to a halt. By contrast, a Macintosh cluster can be made from a mix of G3 and G4 Macs running Mac OS 9 or X."
while almost the first sentence in the 1-page-pdf says:
"Requirements: Macintoshes running OS X 10.1 or later..."
It seems the "basically GPL" points to the facts that they will NOT distribute binaries of the program for the following reasons:
The program contains several files with incompatible licenses especially on the redistribution clauses
The program uses special hardware like MMX, SSE, fastmemcpy for optimization. A binary can not cope with a lot of hardware specialization. (So binary distribution will make the program appear terribly slow)
MPlayer is not plugin-based, libraries are compiled into the binary, the number of possible library versions makes distribution of a few different binaries almost impossible
But on the webpage they say they are developing towards GPl. So they seem to try to make a decent & GPLed program.
But then, some quotes from http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/, their homepage. That give a slightly different view of the developers:
There is a topic about current affairs on Slashdot. It's very lame, offtopic, and nobody RTFM'ed there, so won't get a link.:)
Update: I have one message to the Slashdot folks: if you want binaries to be distributable, send working runtime CPU detect code+etc, not just shout "yes, let's support projects that are more opensource". Opensource is about helping and contributing. We rather develop new features than piss with licenses. If you don't like it, why do you use MPlayer? Over and out.
And in the FAQ
Q: The GUI isn't usable with icewm, because some panel are over the movie!! A: Known, icewm is shit and dictatoric. Unsolvable. In detail: icewm sucks because its taskbar overrides GUI's window resize queries. If it asks for resize to 800x600, then it resizes window to 800x(600-taskbar_size). It's bad. Very bad. In short: shit.
Damn pity, it was quite nice so long it lasted. Anyone an idea on how to download the entire site, a distributed wget could be usefull here don't think that exists though
IMHO the flaw in backdoor'd crypto is the fact that it takes fairly simple mathematics to create your own cryptography scheme, and even fewer to program an encrypter/decrypter since there are many schemes known (and those schemes can't be withheld from people), so criminals will have access to cryptography tools that will make sure the FBI/CIA/... can't look at it.
The only reason for backdoor'd crypto is that if enough people trust security agencies and use backdoor'd crypto, messages that are encrypted with an crypto without backdoor will stand out, and therefore will be able to get attention from those agencies.
maybe it's not even such a bad idea when a group of slashdot users will trie to do this. It definitely shows the stupidity of the consequences of the DMCA. But we'll need the inventor of ASCII then and i think he had to give away all his rights when it became a standard.
Just a quote i heard at the european robot soccer competition in amsterdam, 2000. It was about the iranian people winning with their team because they didn't have the money for expensive hardware (so no harddrive) and therefore had to do it all in RAM (or floppy i guess). The punchline was that a lot of the harddrives locked up and crashed the robots. So just don't use a harddrive like they did but a floppy linux release or so, though that would probably be hard to get X on.
[This] is the first case of human germline genetic modification resulting in normal healthy children St Barnabas Institute for Reproductive Medicine researchers
Does that imply there has been genetic modification resulting in not so healthy children? Just wondering...
"If an individual freely chooses to join a service that moderates... then the viewer has expressed his inalienable right to listen only to what he wants,"
"Nothing," McMahon adds, "could be more democratic."
No the viewer expressed to listen to a mostly common opinion. A better way for a really democratic moderation system would be one that moderates on bases of your previous opinions and others who sort of share your opinion. Like a "me moderated" version of/.
It looks like 3Com found out that Audrey is just really ugly, and that would be a really good reason to discontinue it. But if according to http://slashdot.org/articles/00/09/29/1249259.shtm l it's only 6/7 months old why stop that soon?
or "Apparently the pics were up for just a couple of minutes, and then replaced with some boring "Coming Soon" graphics. So screw waiting, check it out. "Was it just minutes before they found out they better discontinued it?
Why not just mount the CPU pendicular on the motherboard. I know it would be really easy to break it off then (for frequent box openers) and o lot of pins would have to get on a lot smaller surface but hey now the cpu has 2 sides for cooling instead of 1. Seems like an idea, and since the coolers are quite big those could also be mounted on the motherboard to make it not so easy to break.
it was like big news about a few weeks ago. The classification for TV in fact just started on the 17th of march (for movies it was the 22th of february). The classification system itself distinguishes 4 different age groups (AL: for all, MG6: 6 and up (parental overlook might be necessary), 12: 12 and up, and 16: 16 and up) and has 4 pictograms that can be added (for sex, violence,...). There was quite a lot of international media attention since this was the first system covering the entire audiovisual industry (games, movies, TV). more information (int dutch) on http://www.kijkwijzer.nl
Since about a month there is also a classification system for video games in the Netherlands. We used to have a system only for movies but now the industry itself (probably pushed by our goverment) came up with one system classifying games, movies and TV. I personally don't care much about those classifications but I like the idea of self regulation.
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen two Game Boys stop working after the screen protector was glued back on :( Other than that they're really solid machines.
I always thought Ebola didn't spread really good because of it killing the host too quick. Maybe an analogy holds for computer viruses.
You could try the OmniWeb Beta, it indexes the sites you have in your history (btw. there is a search framework in Panther that you could use to build something like this yourself)
fp
My grandfather once gave me a copy of this book. Being interested in what I do learning Artificial Intelligence he also read it. He found it clarifying the possibilities of AI and IT in general a lot. Him not having the slightest experience with computers generally would mean that it's not so interesting for someone deeper into the subject.
But while it's true that the book doesn't get really technical and left me wondering for a lot of the details, the enthusiastic way it's written and the really original projects that are described make it a really nice read. It's really motivating and can help the known problem of having learned a programming language and not having the slightest clue what to program in it.
I think that when you don't see it as a computer book but as reading material for a holiday the book deserves more than a 5. Borrow it from someone and read it, it's not like it'll take a lot of time.
Forget small robots on wheels playing soccer ...
Please let not forget about those small robots, the design and contest goals are quite different for the small/medium league versus the humanoid league. If I'm not mistaken one of the contests in the humanoid league is standing on 2 feet for an amount of time (ok.. it's the first year for the humanoid league but come on this doesn't look really spectacular), so this league is mostly about designing humanoid robots and writing software for moving them around without falling.
The small and medium size leagues are a lot more about designing distributed systems of autonomous agents and letting them sort out good strategies for play. I think the non humanoid leagues will be much nicer to look at for some years to come and forgetting about them will make a game of robotsoccer even harder to watch (watching one of those games still consists of waiting for a long time looking at robots that decided they better like it standing still.)
And you could get nice real-time audio of him looking at your ear.
Contrary to what RMS says in the article about the free software foundation not being able to use bitkeeper (since they don't want any non-free software on their computers) and therefore having to depend on another to put the kernel source in CVS or to create a free implementation of BitKeeper, in an article about the history of the GNU project he comes to the conclusion he should allow himself to use non-free software in order to create a free implementation of it.
Hmmm.. can't say i'm really disappointed seeing XBOX sales being lower than expected for two reasons (the first being the obligated microsoft bashing one). Ain't it the case that microsoft really, really wants to push XBOX sales in order to get a firm grip on consumer electronics (selling services and home-entertainment being the direction they want to direct their company)?
If so they could consider lowering the price of their machine, possibly up till an amount lower than the cost of manufacturing it (they have the cash and want to get into the market, not sure whether the machine is already cheaper than the cost of manufacturing it). If they do so it would be a nice platform to get to build your own home-entertainment device (divx playing, mp3s, etc. Probably no TIVO like stuff sinds i don't think has TV in... damn)
It would be a really good idea to make clustering easier, but there is a trade-off between easiness and performance. Making the creation of clusters easy ("a few G4 Macs, some Ethernet cables, a hub and the Pooch software.") by only talking about the easy-to-use software and not optimized network topology (correct me if i'm wrong but the Beowulf handbook probably covers a lot of that) will definitely keep performance quite low.
BTW. on the wired site it says:
while almost the first sentence in the 1-page-pdf says:It seems the "basically GPL" points to the facts that they will NOT distribute binaries of the program for the following reasons:
But on the webpage they say they are developing towards GPl. So they seem to try to make a decent & GPLed program.
But then, some quotes from http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/, their homepage. That give a slightly different view of the developers:
And in the FAQDamn pity, it was quite nice so long it lasted. Anyone an idea on how to download the entire site, a distributed wget could be usefull here don't think that exists though
IMHO the flaw in backdoor'd crypto is the fact that it takes fairly simple mathematics to create your own cryptography scheme, and even fewer to program an encrypter/decrypter since there are many schemes known (and those schemes can't be withheld from people), so criminals will have access to cryptography tools that will make sure the FBI/CIA/... can't look at it.
The only reason for backdoor'd crypto is that if enough people trust security agencies and use backdoor'd crypto, messages that are encrypted with an crypto without backdoor will stand out, and therefore will be able to get attention from those agencies.
Anyone any ideas on this?
maybe it's not even such a bad idea when a group of slashdot users will trie to do this. It definitely shows the stupidity of the consequences of the DMCA. But we'll need the inventor of ASCII then and i think he had to give away all his rights when it became a standard.
Just a quote i heard at the european robot soccer competition in amsterdam, 2000. It was about the iranian people winning with their team because they didn't have the money for expensive hardware (so no harddrive) and therefore had to do it all in RAM (or floppy i guess). The punchline was that a lot of the harddrives locked up and crashed the robots. So just don't use a harddrive like they did but a floppy linux release or so, though that would probably be hard to get X on.
From the nice quote box on the BBC Page
[This] is the first case of human germline genetic modification resulting in normal healthy children
St Barnabas Institute for Reproductive Medicine researchers
Does that imply there has been genetic modification resulting in not so healthy children? Just wondering...
"If an individual freely chooses to join a service that moderates ... then the viewer has expressed his inalienable right to listen only to what he wants,"
/.
"Nothing," McMahon adds, "could be more democratic."
No the viewer expressed to listen to a mostly common opinion. A better way for a really democratic moderation system would be one that moderates on bases of your previous opinions and others who sort of share your opinion. Like a "me moderated" version of
It looks like 3Com found out that Audrey is just really ugly, and that would be a really good reason to discontinue it. But if according to http://slashdot.org/articles/00/09/29/1249259.shtm l it's only 6/7 months old why stop that soon?
or "Apparently the pics were up for just a couple of minutes, and then replaced with some boring "Coming Soon" graphics. So screw waiting, check it out. "Was it just minutes before they found out they better discontinued it?
Why not just mount the CPU pendicular on the motherboard. I know it would be really easy to break it off then (for frequent box openers) and o lot of pins would have to get on a lot smaller surface but hey now the cpu has 2 sides for cooling instead of 1. Seems like an idea, and since the coolers are quite big those could also be mounted on the motherboard to make it not so easy to break.
it was like big news about a few weeks ago. The classification for TV in fact just started on the 17th of march (for movies it was the 22th of february). The classification system itself distinguishes 4 different age groups (AL: for all, MG6: 6 and up (parental overlook might be necessary), 12: 12 and up, and 16: 16 and up) and has 4 pictograms that can be added (for sex, violence, ...). There was quite a lot of international media attention since this was the first system covering the entire audiovisual industry (games, movies, TV). more information (int dutch) on http://www.kijkwijzer.nl
Since about a month there is also a classification system for video games in the Netherlands. We used to have a system only for movies but now the industry itself (probably pushed by our goverment) came up with one system classifying games, movies and TV. I personally don't care much about those classifications but I like the idea of self regulation.