its expensive as a lot of their routers can't fast switch with ACLs applied... It can also be a PITA to maintain
All true, but increasingly no defence for a lazy ISP. It's jolly inconvenient
for me to stop my car at red lights, but it's my duty as a good road-using
citizen to do so, even if I don't think I'll get into an accident.
if you put it at the very edge, like on an ISPs peering router with their upstream, it doesn't prevent in-block spoofing
Indeed, it's an imperfect solution, but it does give a start to a beseiged
site - better they (and their downstream) block a whole ISPblock or whole
ISP than go down entirely. Unfortunately, there's a selfish counterargument
to this - an ISP who is a good citizen and implements blocking may (if it's
subsequently used for DDoS) find itself cut off from (e.g.) yahoo or ebay - one
that doesn't will get a _little_ more service, until the target itself
expires.
I'd argue that ISPs should make it a term of service that *their* customers ACL their edge routers; we-catch-spoofing-we-cut-you-off language.
I'd second that - on the contract line following "thou shalt not maintain an
open SMTP relay".
Perhaps someone more network-literate than I can answer this DDoS question,
which has bothered me for some time.
I believe most DDoS attacks have the following in common:
DDoS zombies generally send packets with forged return addresses, as
doing so greatly complicates attempts both to block packets and to track
down individual zombies.
Machines used for DDoS attacks are almost always either corporate PCs
or home PCs connected by DSL/cable. These nodes are single-homed, and
as such packets emanating from them have only one initial route to the
internet.
My question is this - why can't corporate IT people or their counterparts
at ISPs reprogram their front-line routers (those that directly connect
to individual end-user PCs) to block packets with forged return addresses?
Forged addresses typically are either totally illegal or indicate a totally
different net or subnet from the actual sender.
I can't see any reason why this wouldn't be a good idea - there really
isn't any reason for the type of machines mentioned to ever act as
true IP routers (as opposed to NATs), and it doesn't seem like this would
be either hard or burdensome for the first-line routers to do.
Employing this would mean that DDoSers would be confined to forging return
addresses within the zombies' own subnet, which would make both blocking
and back-tracking much easier.
It's plain that this isn't done, so there must be a good reason why people
much more network savvy than I haven't implemented it - what is it?
Wouldn't it be cute if the front passenger could browse Mapquest and have the map automatically scroll and rotate based on the position and direction returned by the car's navigation?
Cute, sure - but $2000 cute?
The scrolls-to-follow-location thing is exactly how in-car nav systems work now (and for equally
excessive prices, which is why they're so rare), although they generally
get the map data from CDs. No browser needed and, as both cell coverage and
bandwidth aren't up to the job, a browser isn't a sensible way to implement
navigation presently. By the time G3 comes in (and to a limited extent in
Japan right now) you get location-specific cellphone services which includes
navigation - and cellphone based nav means you can walk it around after you park,
or use it in someone else's car.
I figure on-board (i.e. data on CDs in
the trunk) navigation will always be so expensive as to be a fairly marginal
product.
a 166 MHz RISC processor with 64MB RAM and 8MB video
Those are ridiculous, excessive specs for a consumer device. You can
get perfectly good HTML (including images, javascript) browsing on
8Mb RAM devices, and something quite useful for lots of sites on much
less. Sure, you can spend more to get more, but what will the customer
want, and how much will they pay?
Automotive spec hardware (especially RAM) is at least
three times the price of its in-home equivalent - it needs a considerably
greater temperature range and better power and MF-tolerance characteristics.
As a result, this is a very expensive item.
Worse, it's
not really doing all that much. Who needs a calendar/address book tied
to their car when a cellphone or PDA can to a fine job much more flexibly?
Who needs a webbrowser in their car - and for those few why wouldn't a
laptop be a vastly superior solution?
So why are Clarion (who generally aren't stupid) making such a thing?
They, like all the automotive electronics companies, are scared sh*tless
of the cellphone companies taking away the emerging navigation and
mobile entertainment markets. They're right to be scared: they are
going to lose that battle. Clarion is releasing this (they'll sell about
10, especially in Japan where cellphones already do amazing things) to
keep their investors happy and pretend to the big boss that they've got
a high-end future. In the super-price-aware automotive market, a
do-little device at >$2K is madness.
The only advantage that automotive-electronics companies have
over cellphone companies is they can easily get attached to the
vehicles (generally arcane) bus - a problem that could easily be
fixed by a standard connector to which one would attach one's cellphone.
If memory serves, the Mac's math libraries initially used decimal strings to
represent numbers - it's been a decade since I wrote a Mac program - perhaps
someone with more current knowledge can shed some light as to whether this is
still the case?
Also, Java's java.lang.math.BigDecimal class contains just the kind of
functionality you describe - its docs are
here.
In general, I think you'll find lots of fixed point math libraries around - they're
mostly intended for numerical computation and mathematical cryptography (e.g RSA),
but they should be quite applicable (if sometimes overkill) for your biz-app
uses.
This is a subject that's rather neglected -
three years of college math didn't go very far in letting me understand
how math (fp and otherwise) is actually done in discrete systems.
A year (or so) ago I attended a lecture given by Guy Steele (of Lisp/Java/
Crunchly fame) on his proposal to alter how IEEE floating point numbers
are mapped to real numbers. It quickly flew over my head, but gave a great
insight into the whole field. Steele then had a fair old "discussion" with
the one person in the audience whose head hadn't been overflown (sic), as
there was plainly still much controversy left in this area. On trying to do
some "why didn't I get this stuff at college" reading, I found there wasn't
a great deal of literature.
The reviewer's concern that coprocessor-less systems should be covered is
valid, but I'm not sure going as far as assembly is necessary. For example,
I once had the privilige of reading through Hitachi's libm implementation for
their H8 series microprocessor/microcontroller (one would be generous to
call H8 a 16-bit system, and ungenerous to call it an 8-bit system). With one
small exception (I think the cos table lookup) the whole thing was in (quite
readable) C, and (at least for basic libm stuff) performance was perfectly
acceptable. For didactic purposes, a C (or sane C++) implementation would
be the thing one would want to find in a book - I get very annoyed at embedded
books where the examples are written in asm for the author's favourite (obscure)
microcontroller.
They call this stuff Symmetric Multi Threading, but I think that name is a bit misleading.
I believe when symmetric is used in the context of SMP and SMT it is
intended to mean "all execution elements have the same public interface".
Things would be asymmetric in cases where there was a differentiation
between the performance or capabilities of the execution elements - e.g. where
one processor could handle interrupts and the other couldn't. An 80286+80287 is
an example of an asymmetric system - one execution element can only do FP stuff,
the other can do everything but FP.
From what I've read there is no mandate that the cable companies have to switch anything.
I believe you're correct.
They will have to receive DTV signals, since analog will go away
One would imagine that they largely get content from the TV stations in digital format already (although probably not the consumer DTV type) - I remember my local public TV station (KTEH) appealing a while ago for monies to upgrade their plant (cameras etc.) to digital, something one imagines the for-profit guys did a long time ago. I _really_ hope they're not turning a digital signal to analog, sending that to the cable company, who then redigitize (argh!) to send to digital cable subscribers - surely not!
Palm's innovation-curve is flatter than ever, particularly at the high-end, and they're continuing to lose market share to winCE units (despite winCE still being, well, winCE). Dragonball just doesn't have the horses to cope with the stuff one would want the next-generation of mobile-comms-organiser-thingy do to (decent audio, voice, decent handwriting-rec, games, still & moving images). Sony in particular have done an amazing job squeezing performance out of the palm platform, but there's a limit.
A palm unit with an ARM is _long_ overdue. I want a decent, useful, modern handheld, and I don't want more windows.
Palm can't compete in the low-end electronic-diary market - Casio, Sharp et al will
eat their lunch - and currently their concept of innovation seems to consist of putting the same unit they've been making for years in a cool new case.
It's nazi crap to give a GIANT chunk of public property (spectrum) to corporations, for free.
It's nazi crap to make it a serious felony for anyone else to use that property for anything.
It's nazi crap to prevent anyone else from using other chunks of spectrum to compete with those corporate monopolies.
That VASTLY valuable chunk of spectrum remains the property in common of WE THE PEOPLE, and WE THE PEOPLE shall (or should) tell those few corporations currently blessed with monopoly control over those commons that they WILL do whatever the hell we damn well tell them to do with it.
If the TV companies paid anything like the market rate for spectrum then the proceeds would pay for DTV decoders for everyone, many many times over.
The US stands to slip further behind on the mobile-telecoms front when G3
wireless (eventually) shows up. Europe and Japan have enough bandwidth
alloted to G3 to make it workable, but the US doesn't.
US G3 proponents were lobbying congress heavily to get the military to give up
some vast chunks of spectrum they currently have, and which they use very inefficiently (lots of analog, and still a frightening amount of morse). After 9-11 the military knows no-one is going to hassle it over this.
One thing that could save the G3 situation is if congress/FCC assigns some of the analog bands vacated by analog-TV to G3 - but (as previous posters said) this spectrum is valuable, and the TV companies will be loath to part with it. Even then, that 2007 deadline will probably slip another couple of years, which means DTV won't save G3. Uh-oh.
The deadline of which the yahoo! article speaks is for DTV - where the over-the-air/cable
signal is digital. There is no requirement for the resolution to be any
greater than currently available for NTSC.
Digital TV has been creeping in for years, all without anyone buying a
new TV. In the UK we had BSB digital a decade ago, and BskyB is digital now,
and I believe Dish network in the US is also digital. Most europeans have
access to over-the-air digital with DVB boxes, and in the US one can get AT&T digital over cable. [Some of these (dish, BskyB at least) transmit one or two
HDTV channels, but these mostly seem to be used in TV stores to try to sell
the occasional HDTV set.]
All of this is done with external translator boxes in the
comsumers home - almost no-one has either a DTV, never mind an HDTV.
My local COMET store is selling funny little DVB translator boxes for around 60 quid, so all this stuff about digital TV adding hundreds to the cost of TVs is horseshit. I'd bet that once every TV can do DVB, they'll be _cheaper_ than regular TVs.
Now, there's other reasons to worry about DTV, not least the greatly increased
control this gives the content/distribution folks, but "I need to buy three new TVs" isn't one of them.
For anyone who's still interesting in those classic C64 tunes, Chris Abbott
(and some other folks, I think) has remade a bunch of C64 tunes with modern equipment - I can strongly recommend his site
I've recently returned to the UK after spending several years in Silicon Valley. When I left, dialup was metered and broadband unheard of. On returning, I've been pleasantly surprised by the offerings the UK telcos now have for internet access. Unmetered access is common, and at a price & quality equal to that I enjoyed in the US. Options (and prices) for broadband are considerably better than I enjoyed in Silicon Valley. I think the UK telcos (especially BT) finally get the internet.
<grumble>Okay, I lived 1/4 mile from El Camino in Mountain View, and stupid PacBell said I couldn't get DSL (toooo faaaar). If you can't rely on broadband in the densest area of the world's technology capital - where can you?</grumble>
This is a bit ironic (yes, I do know what that means) given sub-oceanic sites are candidates to be future carbon sequestration sites - see
this page. So we're talking about extracting hydrocarbons from one ocean floor, burning them, taking the resuling CO2 and pumping it down into another ocean floor, and at the same time extracting a vastly superior greenhouse gas (methane) from said second hole. Time for me to buy real-estate on Baffin Island. I think. </serious>
<daft>So it's obvious how these methane deposits were formed -
they're carbon-sequestration caches, established by a reptillian civilisation during the silurian period, in their attempt to avoid their global warming problem - but they were too effective, and caused the ice-age that begins the devonian, and did away with the silly silurians' civilisation.</daft>
However, NASA is in a budget crunch with the Space Station cost overruns
Just what is the space station actually for?
it's an expensive way to get second-rate microgravity
it's a rotten, wobbly astronomy platform
no-one is allowed to experiment with low-G sex (given the Russians' new found capitalistic streak, it's a wonder we've not seen any low-G porno yet - or maybe I'm just not in the loop on that)
despite what the conspiracy-theory boys say, it'd make a crappy spy satellite and a worse orbital weapons platform
there's only so many interesting things we can find out about
how spiders make webs in freefall
it's not even an efficient way for the US government to prop up the Russian government
The money spent on this (and the space shuttle) could be spent on real science and could get a thousand off-the-shelf spaceprobes to interesting places.
I suppose getting rid of Lance Bass would have made it worthwhile, but even that's not going to happen anymore (unless/.ers constribute to a paypal account for this purpose...)
roses are red
violets are blue
the Russians have satellite laser weapons
so why can't we too?
Re:Important Step?
on
Awari Solved
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I don't quite understand why a big lookup table is an important step for AI.
I think you're quite correct here. Brute force isn't a reasonable solution to most interesting realworld problems, and it's hard to see how this approach is instructive for future AI research.
Humans don't play games by checking every possible move and picking the best one and never will.
The AI community really needs to stop looking for tricks that allow computers to solve problems in ways that humans never could
Ah, now I think you're overstating things a bit. It sounds like your objection is predicated (sic) upon the assumption that the sole purpose of AI research is to reproduce biological, and finally human, intelligence, and that the way biological brains do it is the only way it can be done. I think that's not necessarily the case.
In the first matter, there's plenty of higher-order problems that we might want solved, and there's no reason to suppose that a human thought process is the best way to go about things. The sole purpose of AI research isn't to pass a Turing test. A truly artificial intelligence, that solves hard problems in exotic ways would still be a very interesting and useful thing to possess, even if one couldn't talk sports with it.
In the second matter, it's still a contentious matter whether human-like intelligence could ever be built with hardware and software components like the ones we have today. In the event that it is, it's quite possible that the artificial solution would take a radically different path than the biological - a path worthy of exploration, interesting even if it ends in a blind alley.
...and instead spend their time trying to understand how intelligence actually works.
That's not unlike saying that birds fly by flapping feathery wings, and thus so should passenger aircraft - they're solving different problems, and with different means.
Study of the biological solution is instructive - mere apeing of it isn't.
Well, I can mostly only speak for MIPS assembly, but that's very far from
the hideous gothic nastiness of x86 - it's just like an 8-bit micro
(esp Z80) just with bigger registers and more of 'em.
Some details (it's been a while) that I can remember are:
No "special" registers - they're all stored as offboard registers
on one of a number of "coprocessors". This is true even for FP
registers.
Highly symetrical instruction set.
Doesn't enforce register conventions - stack-pointer, short-pointer,
parameter-pointers and return addr are all just an optional convention,
not baked into the chip.
Once you've gotten used to some of MIPS' ideosyncracies (mandatory data alignment,
branch-delay slots, having to reinterpret excepted branches in software) then
it's just like the good old 6502 days.
I have less experience of PPC, SPARC, and ARM, but all are similar - clean feeling,
but each with a few wacky RISC wrinkles.
It's interesting to see how the same old problem is solved in a new way when your target user varies from the usual.
I'm always impressed by the connectors for peripherals (generally controllers) on modern video-game consoles. Consider, if you will, the humble playstation connector:
It can be operated successfully by a two year old, with no training or supervision.
It's impossible to connect it wrongly.
It appears to be entirely immune to the harmful environmental contaminants associated with its users (small children and lonely geeks).
... and it absolutely, positively will not break.
If only connectors for "grownups" were designed this way.
>13.6% of "suspects" arrested in England last year (2001) were never heard from again.
It's worse than you think.
Those 13.6% are infact transported to a massive underground slave complex in Milton Keynes, where they labour on computers, remotely providing (in real time) the "intelligence" for characters in the "popular" computer game Black and White.
I've learned that my Black and White creature (Wally the Wolf) is in fact a lady named Jenny from Swansea, who was pulled over for doing 75 on the M4 last year. She says that if she messes up (and has Wally eat his own poop or something) then Richard Evans will hit her with a rolled up copy of the Milngavie & Bearsden Herald.
Slashdot Mirror
All true, but increasingly no defence for a lazy ISP. It's jolly inconvenient for me to stop my car at red lights, but it's my duty as a good road-using citizen to do so, even if I don't think I'll get into an accident.
if you put it at the very edge, like on an ISPs peering router with their upstream, it doesn't prevent in-block spoofing
Indeed, it's an imperfect solution, but it does give a start to a beseiged site - better they (and their downstream) block a whole ISPblock or whole ISP than go down entirely. Unfortunately, there's a selfish counterargument to this - an ISP who is a good citizen and implements blocking may (if it's subsequently used for DDoS) find itself cut off from (e.g.) yahoo or ebay - one that doesn't will get a _little_ more service, until the target itself expires.
I'd argue that ISPs should make it a term of service that *their* customers ACL their edge routers; we-catch-spoofing-we-cut-you-off language.
I'd second that - on the contract line following "thou shalt not maintain an open SMTP relay".
Strictly, it needs only to figure out your true identity to do this blacklisting.
For ethernet connected devices (corporate and college LANs) the ethernet address serves this function.
I have no idea how this would be achieved with PPP (dialup) and PPPoE (some dsl).
For non PPPoE domestic broadband, one would imagine the DSLAM or DOCSIS-router-thingy would have the equivalent info (for DSL and cable respectively).
I believe most DDoS attacks have the following in common:
- DDoS zombies generally send packets with forged return addresses, as
doing so greatly complicates attempts both to block packets and to track
down individual zombies.
-
Machines used for DDoS attacks are almost always either corporate PCs
or home PCs connected by DSL/cable. These nodes are single-homed, and
as such packets emanating from them have only one initial route to the
internet.
My question is this - why can't corporate IT people or their counterparts at ISPs reprogram their front-line routers (those that directly connect to individual end-user PCs) to block packets with forged return addresses? Forged addresses typically are either totally illegal or indicate a totally different net or subnet from the actual sender.I can't see any reason why this wouldn't be a good idea - there really isn't any reason for the type of machines mentioned to ever act as true IP routers (as opposed to NATs), and it doesn't seem like this would be either hard or burdensome for the first-line routers to do.
Employing this would mean that DDoSers would be confined to forging return addresses within the zombies' own subnet, which would make both blocking and back-tracking much easier.
It's plain that this isn't done, so there must be a good reason why people much more network savvy than I haven't implemented it - what is it?
Cute, sure - but $2000 cute? The scrolls-to-follow-location thing is exactly how in-car nav systems work now (and for equally excessive prices, which is why they're so rare), although they generally get the map data from CDs. No browser needed and, as both cell coverage and bandwidth aren't up to the job, a browser isn't a sensible way to implement navigation presently. By the time G3 comes in (and to a limited extent in Japan right now) you get location-specific cellphone services which includes navigation - and cellphone based nav means you can walk it around after you park, or use it in someone else's car.
I figure on-board (i.e. data on CDs in the trunk) navigation will always be so expensive as to be a fairly marginal product.
Those are ridiculous, excessive specs for a consumer device. You can get perfectly good HTML (including images, javascript) browsing on 8Mb RAM devices, and something quite useful for lots of sites on much less. Sure, you can spend more to get more, but what will the customer want, and how much will they pay?
Automotive spec hardware (especially RAM) is at least three times the price of its in-home equivalent - it needs a considerably greater temperature range and better power and MF-tolerance characteristics. As a result, this is a very expensive item.
Worse, it's not really doing all that much. Who needs a calendar/address book tied to their car when a cellphone or PDA can to a fine job much more flexibly? Who needs a webbrowser in their car - and for those few why wouldn't a laptop be a vastly superior solution?
So why are Clarion (who generally aren't stupid) making such a thing? They, like all the automotive electronics companies, are scared sh*tless of the cellphone companies taking away the emerging navigation and mobile entertainment markets. They're right to be scared: they are going to lose that battle. Clarion is releasing this (they'll sell about 10, especially in Japan where cellphones already do amazing things) to keep their investors happy and pretend to the big boss that they've got a high-end future. In the super-price-aware automotive market, a do-little device at >$2K is madness.
The only advantage that automotive-electronics companies have over cellphone companies is they can easily get attached to the vehicles (generally arcane) bus - a problem that could easily be fixed by a standard connector to which one would attach one's cellphone.
Also, Java's java.lang.math.BigDecimal class contains just the kind of functionality you describe - its docs are here.
In general, I think you'll find lots of fixed point math libraries around - they're mostly intended for numerical computation and mathematical cryptography (e.g RSA), but they should be quite applicable (if sometimes overkill) for your biz-app uses.
A year (or so) ago I attended a lecture given by Guy Steele (of Lisp/Java/ Crunchly fame) on his proposal to alter how IEEE floating point numbers are mapped to real numbers. It quickly flew over my head, but gave a great insight into the whole field. Steele then had a fair old "discussion" with the one person in the audience whose head hadn't been overflown (sic), as there was plainly still much controversy left in this area. On trying to do some "why didn't I get this stuff at college" reading, I found there wasn't a great deal of literature.
The reviewer's concern that coprocessor-less systems should be covered is valid, but I'm not sure going as far as assembly is necessary. For example, I once had the privilige of reading through Hitachi's libm implementation for their H8 series microprocessor/microcontroller (one would be generous to call H8 a 16-bit system, and ungenerous to call it an 8-bit system). With one small exception (I think the cos table lookup) the whole thing was in (quite readable) C, and (at least for basic libm stuff) performance was perfectly acceptable. For didactic purposes, a C (or sane C++) implementation would be the thing one would want to find in a book - I get very annoyed at embedded books where the examples are written in asm for the author's favourite (obscure) microcontroller.
enter KILL ALL HUMANS mode --- *63
leave KILL ALL HUMANS mode --- *6959392054829194585#3*%!54&43^4984
I believe when symmetric is used in the context of SMP and SMT it is intended to mean "all execution elements have the same public interface".
Things would be asymmetric in cases where there was a differentiation between the performance or capabilities of the execution elements - e.g. where one processor could handle interrupts and the other couldn't. An 80286+80287 is an example of an asymmetric system - one execution element can only do FP stuff, the other can do everything but FP.
Apparently Batt gave the Cage Trust a suitcase full of no money.
I believe you're correct.
They will have to receive DTV signals, since analog will go away
One would imagine that they largely get content from the TV stations in digital format already (although probably not the consumer DTV type) - I remember my local public TV station (KTEH) appealing a while ago for monies to upgrade their plant (cameras etc.) to digital, something one imagines the for-profit guys did a long time ago. I _really_ hope they're not turning a digital signal to analog, sending that to the cable company, who then redigitize (argh!) to send to digital cable subscribers - surely not!
A palm unit with an ARM is _long_ overdue. I want a decent, useful, modern handheld, and I don't want more windows.
Palm can't compete in the low-end electronic-diary market - Casio, Sharp et al will eat their lunch - and currently their concept of innovation seems to consist of putting the same unit they've been making for years in a cool new case.
It's nazi crap to make it a serious felony for anyone else to use that property for anything.
It's nazi crap to prevent anyone else from using other chunks of spectrum to compete with those corporate monopolies.
That VASTLY valuable chunk of spectrum remains the property in common of WE THE PEOPLE, and WE THE PEOPLE shall (or should) tell those few corporations currently blessed with monopoly control over those commons that they WILL do whatever the hell we damn well tell them to do with it.
If the TV companies paid anything like the market rate for spectrum then the proceeds would pay for DTV decoders for everyone, many many times over.
US G3 proponents were lobbying congress heavily to get the military to give up some vast chunks of spectrum they currently have, and which they use very inefficiently (lots of analog, and still a frightening amount of morse). After 9-11 the military knows no-one is going to hassle it over this.
One thing that could save the G3 situation is if congress/FCC assigns some of the analog bands vacated by analog-TV to G3 - but (as previous posters said) this spectrum is valuable, and the TV companies will be loath to part with it. Even then, that 2007 deadline will probably slip another couple of years, which means DTV won't save G3. Uh-oh.
Digital TV has been creeping in for years, all without anyone buying a new TV. In the UK we had BSB digital a decade ago, and BskyB is digital now, and I believe Dish network in the US is also digital. Most europeans have access to over-the-air digital with DVB boxes, and in the US one can get AT&T digital over cable. [Some of these (dish, BskyB at least) transmit one or two HDTV channels, but these mostly seem to be used in TV stores to try to sell the occasional HDTV set.] All of this is done with external translator boxes in the comsumers home - almost no-one has either a DTV, never mind an HDTV.
My local COMET store is selling funny little DVB translator boxes for around 60 quid, so all this stuff about digital TV adding hundreds to the cost of TVs is horseshit. I'd bet that once every TV can do DVB, they'll be _cheaper_ than regular TVs.
Now, there's other reasons to worry about DTV, not least the greatly increased control this gives the content/distribution folks, but "I need to buy three new TVs" isn't one of them.
One could distribute the edits alone online, and someone else could play their DVD filtered through that editset.
So everyone can remove the "dirty bits" of DVDs. For the right-wingers, that's kissing, nipples, evolution. For the test of us - Jar Jar.
See our helpful friends (ahem) down at RSA. Dan Bernstein has more here.
For anyone who's still interesting in those classic C64 tunes, Chris Abbott (and some other folks, I think) has remade a bunch of C64 tunes with modern equipment - I can strongly recommend his site
<grumble>Okay, I lived 1/4 mile from El Camino in Mountain View, and stupid PacBell said I couldn't get DSL (toooo faaaar). If you can't rely on broadband in the densest area of the world's technology capital - where can you?</grumble>
<daft>So it's obvious how these methane deposits were formed - they're carbon-sequestration caches, established by a reptillian civilisation during the silurian period, in their attempt to avoid their global warming problem - but they were too effective, and caused the ice-age that begins the devonian, and did away with the silly silurians' civilisation.</daft>
Just what is the space station actually for?
The money spent on this (and the space shuttle) could be spent on real science and could get a thousand off-the-shelf spaceprobes to interesting places.
I suppose getting rid of Lance Bass would have made it worthwhile, but even that's not going to happen anymore (unless /.ers constribute to a paypal account for this purpose...)
roses are red
violets are blue
the Russians have satellite laser weapons
so why can't we too?
I think you're quite correct here. Brute force isn't a reasonable solution to most interesting realworld problems, and it's hard to see how this approach is instructive for future AI research.
Humans don't play games by checking every possible move and picking the best one and never will. The AI community really needs to stop looking for tricks that allow computers to solve problems in ways that humans never could
Ah, now I think you're overstating things a bit. It sounds like your objection is predicated (sic) upon the assumption that the sole purpose of AI research is to reproduce biological, and finally human, intelligence, and that the way biological brains do it is the only way it can be done. I think that's not necessarily the case.
In the first matter, there's plenty of higher-order problems that we might want solved, and there's no reason to suppose that a human thought process is the best way to go about things. The sole purpose of AI research isn't to pass a Turing test. A truly artificial intelligence, that solves hard problems in exotic ways would still be a very interesting and useful thing to possess, even if one couldn't talk sports with it.
In the second matter, it's still a contentious matter whether human-like intelligence could ever be built with hardware and software components like the ones we have today. In the event that it is, it's quite possible that the artificial solution would take a radically different path than the biological - a path worthy of exploration, interesting even if it ends in a blind alley.
That's not unlike saying that birds fly by flapping feathery wings, and thus so should passenger aircraft - they're solving different problems, and with different means.
Study of the biological solution is instructive - mere apeing of it isn't.
Well, I can mostly only speak for MIPS assembly, but that's very far from the hideous gothic nastiness of x86 - it's just like an 8-bit micro (esp Z80) just with bigger registers and more of 'em.
Some details (it's been a while) that I can remember are:
Once you've gotten used to some of MIPS' ideosyncracies (mandatory data alignment, branch-delay slots, having to reinterpret excepted branches in software) then it's just like the good old 6502 days.
I have less experience of PPC, SPARC, and ARM, but all are similar - clean feeling, but each with a few wacky RISC wrinkles.
Death to x86
I'm always impressed by the connectors for peripherals (generally controllers) on modern video-game consoles. Consider, if you will, the humble playstation connector:
If only connectors for "grownups" were designed this way.
It's worse than you think.
Those 13.6% are infact transported to a massive underground slave complex in Milton Keynes, where they labour on computers, remotely providing (in real time) the "intelligence" for characters in the "popular" computer game Black and White.
I've learned that my Black and White creature (Wally the Wolf) is in fact a lady named Jenny from Swansea, who was pulled over for doing 75 on the M4 last year. She says that if she messes up (and has Wally eat his own poop or something) then Richard Evans will hit her with a rolled up copy of the Milngavie & Bearsden Herald.
That's just plain wrong!