Chess: You have six unique pieces (king, queen, bishop, knight, rook, pawn). Two sides. And the possibility of empty squares. 13 possibilities total (6*2+1). 64 squares total. Two possibilities for whose turn it is. Doesn't that make it 2*13^64 at most? That's about 4*10^71, and a lot of those possibilities are utterly impossible (i.e. not exactly one king per side, entire board filled with queens, that sort of thing.)
Where on earth is that 10^150 figure coming from? I don't believe it for a second.
One question I have - does Microsoft have any history of *enforcing* their ludicrous patents?
It's entirely possible that as soon as this Eolas fiasco hit, all the Microsoft managers told their groups to grab all the patents they could just so it wouldn't happen again, and personally I wouldn't blame them.
Sure, MS has a ton of idiotic patents. So does *everyone* now. That's just the way business works, as lousy at it is.
In any case, as mentioned, there's enormous prior art for the plugin technology - Eolas doesn't have a leg to stand on, *if* you're a tech and know how this should work. The courts, unfortunately, aren't wonderful technologically.
If orchestras buy this new technology, you may be able to rent a Concert Companion PDA for $7 or $10 at a concert hall near you as soon as the fall of 2004.
Brilliant. Just brilliant. Let's take the idea we had to get people listening to the music in the first place, and then charge people extra money for it. With marketing sense like this I'm not *surprised* they're going out of business.
It'd be like an airline proclaiming "Now, all our seats have TVs mounted in them, so you can watch video without straining your eyes, or play video games! Note: TVs require a $25 fee to use." Yeah, wonderful. If you were offering it for free I'd be interested, and more people would use your airline (wasn't that the reason to install them in the first place?), but as it is, why bother?
I've looked through the WBXML specs. You'll still have overhead, unless you design your DTD to be as un-XMLish as possible (which sort of defeats both purposes at the same time.)
How much overhead, and how much it matters, depends entirely on the DTD, the data being sent, and what you're planning to do with it. However, I can't think of any reason you'd want to use WBXML for this - not only do you get added overhead, but you don't even get human-readability. It's the worst of both worlds! Go fad programming!
I think it depends on how sensitive you are to these things. I know for a fact that I'm extremely sensitive to audio and visual problems, to the point where it's almost problematical - high-quality online radio streams sound muddy to me, I can't bear to watch high-speed animation on any LCD monitor I've seen (they're getting better, but I can still see the blurring), and more than once I've ended up playing cutscenes from games over and over so I can show my friends where the codec artifacts are.
One ugly little spot lasting a fraction of a second would irritate me, but I'd live with it. I wonder how many there actually are in these movies, though - I'd probably see every one of them, and it might seriously detract from the movie >_< I don't know how sensitive you are or how many were actually in that movie, but some posters apparently have seen a *lot* of them.
Wireless isn't always great - at the place I work, we have 100mbit ethernet across the entire office and we *need* it. We're constantly sending large files around, and in fact, we've got the server on a gigabit switch (which means that when some of our programs run, now they bottleneck on hard drive speed instead of ethernet speed. IDE RAID just isn't fast enough.)
11mbit would be death to us. When it's easy to set up a wired network, I think it's definitely preferable.
"Hey, I just got a new Voodoo2! Yeah, I saw that TNT board, but that's just crazy. Nobody would buy an NVidia board, 3dfx is king."
"So you heard about 3dfx dying? Yeah, who woulda thunk. I just bought myself a Geforce 2. Radeon? What's that? Who'd want an ATI board? NVidia rocks."
"Man, those GFFX benchmarks are terrible. So much for NVidia. I'm happy with my Radeon 9700 Pro. Hey, did you hear about that new S3 chip? Ha ha. Idiots. There's no *way* they could break into this market."
I wonder how much it would cost to plate it with solar panels, and what kind of efficiency boosts you'd get. And how long it would take to get a full charge, of course.
Assuming it's like a normal Topcoder match (which I honestly don't know), you'll have to write a class with a member function that takes parameters. The parameters might be ints, or might be strings, vectors, or vectors of strings. Plus, you'll have to return something that might be any of those. However it's pretty trivial to convert from those to whatever C-compatible format you want - so with a little C++ glue around your C code, yes, it would indeed be doable.
Define "making money from spam". Then prove that a given spammer is, in fact, making money from spam. Then demonstrate that it's possible to track the spammer down and prove (1) that they were the person sending spam, and (2) that they were the one profiting off it.
I can just see it - people start sending out thousands of emails advertising Britney Spears' newest album, in an attempt to get her arrested for spamming . ..
Saying "making money from spam should be made illegal" is all very nice, but unfortunately, the reality of implementing that is *much* nastier.
The CPU time isn't always cheaper than the bandwidth. Some sites get cheap bandwidth and serve a ludicrous number of database-driven pages that are slightly different from each other - they're designed so that the database servers can handle the load, but gzipping every single page absolutely slaughters the webservers, which are barely doing anything more than relaying requests back to the database servers and are *still* running at high load.
As for your first comment, that's what root exploits are for. Yes, they exist. Not many, but enough.
However, I personally have never seen a Linux box in use that was mounted off a CD. I know they exist, and yes, they'd be pretty secure - but I have never once seen one. Statistically insignificant.
I've actually gotten irritated enough with "Linux is more secure than anything!" zealots that I've considered writing a Linux worm. I seriously doubt it would be hard. Go find some old security advisories for Apache, SSL, and anything else you want. Hook together a Linux-killer worm that tries all of the exploits, installs a rootkit on the compromised system, and sets that one up to probe. If you wanted to be really evil, you could code it to start doing subtle damage after a week - wiping random passwords, deleting random files in user's directories, and so forth. After a few months it could start causing kernel panics if you wanted.
Would it work? Of course it would work. For all the "Linux is secure!" talk going on, what they really mean is "Linux is secure if it's patched up to the most recent versions" (curiously enough, this is the same as Windows). I'll bet you cold hard cash that there are plenty of old unmodified Redhat 5.0 systems out there. How many root exploits have been found in the last few years? How many holes have there been in Apache, SSL, Samba, any other program that's installed by default?
Nobody's done it yet - but that doesn't mean it's not possible.
The only reason I haven't written the worm is because, in the end, I'd cause a whole lot of financial problems and headaches for a lot of people who didn't deserve it. I'd love to prove Linux doesn't have intrinsic perfect security, but I don't want to actually do damage to prove it.
But just wait - someone's going to do this someday. In fact, for all you know, somebody already *has* - they've just programmed it to be unbelievably stealthy and only target systems that the admin hasn't logged onto in months.
I, personally, went into the STL headers and added a #define to range-check operator[]. I turn it on when I'm willing to take the speed hit and turn it off otherwise.
I think the *real* motives of Jack Thompson should be obvious to everyone. You see, he thinks his game was poorly recieved, and he's merely trying to exterminate all the competition.
Wait, you say you didn't know he was in a game? Haven't you ever played The Bermuda Syndrome?
The Bermuda Syndrome basically chronicles the adventures of pilot Jack J. Thompson . . . Final Grade: D
A shoddy disguise at best - all he did is remove his middle initial! Who was he hoping to fool, anyway?
(Moral: You can find facts to back up *anything* on Google.)
Only with untrusted computers, remember. I run a small distributed network at my workplace (the 30 CPUs in the office, about half of which are in the render farm) and don't bother to doublecheck work - if it's wrong, it's my code at fault, and doing it again won't change anything. Nobody's hacking my client for credit - there *isn't* any credit.
Doesn't matter if Google is better, Mozilla is too
No it isn't, it takes, like, five seconds to start. Or more.
Yeah, it's a stupid reason - but I tried it once, and it irritated me so much to have to *wait* for my web browser to load that I switched back.
IE does what I need, and it loads instantly. Mozilla does what I need, and it takes five seconds. Game, set, and match, IE.:P
I have the fundamental belief that the best product will, in fact, win - and that if you think the best product isn't win, perhaps it's a good idea to look at your definition of "best". As a gamer and a casual user, Windows is better than Linux. As a casual impatient web user, IE is better than Mozilla. If I was a coder who wanted to be able to play with the source of my programs, my priorities would be different - however, I'm not, and most people aren't.
Instead of saying "$OPENSOURCEPACKAGE$ is better than $MSPACKAGE$" people should really be asking why the MS software is still being used - the answers would probably surprise then. Until then, I predict MS will remain in the lead, which is a pity because I really do like the open-source philosophy a lot better.
I am sure that the views of Australian citizens will weigh in more than those of a potentially biased American based organisation backed by a company who will be directly adversely affected by the passing of this bill.
Wow, things really *are* different in Australia!
(sorry. cheap shot against America. couldn't resist.:P)
Interviewer: Doing this specific activity breaks the law. Right?
P2P-lover: Well, only insofar as the law is evil and wrong.
RIAA: Yes! You will all be sent to the Underworld!
------
Interviewer: I want to be able to do anything I want. What do you think?
P2P-lover: Sure, why should I care?
RIAA: No! We demand your cash in retribution!
------
Is there a *single* interview question here that asks an interesting question, or one that there's any question about the answer to? P2P person says that anything that stifles the free flow of information is bad. RIAA person says that anything that allows people to make illegal copies of music is bad. RIAA person makes no comments about whether the current copyright situation is for the benefit of the people of America or not, P2P person doesn't mention minor details like, say, what's actually legal.
Slashdot Mirror
"I object, on the grounds my client does not possess that circumvention device."
Wait, hold on.
Chess: You have six unique pieces (king, queen, bishop, knight, rook, pawn). Two sides. And the possibility of empty squares. 13 possibilities total (6*2+1). 64 squares total. Two possibilities for whose turn it is. Doesn't that make it 2*13^64 at most? That's about 4*10^71, and a lot of those possibilities are utterly impossible (i.e. not exactly one king per side, entire board filled with queens, that sort of thing.)
Where on earth is that 10^150 figure coming from? I don't believe it for a second.
Out of curiosity, is there any accepted number for how large the lookup table for the game of Go would be?
One question I have - does Microsoft have any history of *enforcing* their ludicrous patents?
It's entirely possible that as soon as this Eolas fiasco hit, all the Microsoft managers told their groups to grab all the patents they could just so it wouldn't happen again, and personally I wouldn't blame them.
Sure, MS has a ton of idiotic patents. So does *everyone* now. That's just the way business works, as lousy at it is.
In any case, as mentioned, there's enormous prior art for the plugin technology - Eolas doesn't have a leg to stand on, *if* you're a tech and know how this should work. The courts, unfortunately, aren't wonderful technologically.
If orchestras buy this new technology, you may be able to rent a Concert Companion PDA for $7 or $10 at a concert hall near you as soon as the fall of 2004.
Brilliant. Just brilliant. Let's take the idea we had to get people listening to the music in the first place, and then charge people extra money for it. With marketing sense like this I'm not *surprised* they're going out of business.
It'd be like an airline proclaiming "Now, all our seats have TVs mounted in them, so you can watch video without straining your eyes, or play video games! Note: TVs require a $25 fee to use." Yeah, wonderful. If you were offering it for free I'd be interested, and more people would use your airline (wasn't that the reason to install them in the first place?), but as it is, why bother?
I've looked through the WBXML specs. You'll still have overhead, unless you design your DTD to be as un-XMLish as possible (which sort of defeats both purposes at the same time.)
How much overhead, and how much it matters, depends entirely on the DTD, the data being sent, and what you're planning to do with it. However, I can't think of any reason you'd want to use WBXML for this - not only do you get added overhead, but you don't even get human-readability. It's the worst of both worlds! Go fad programming!
I think it depends on how sensitive you are to these things. I know for a fact that I'm extremely sensitive to audio and visual problems, to the point where it's almost problematical - high-quality online radio streams sound muddy to me, I can't bear to watch high-speed animation on any LCD monitor I've seen (they're getting better, but I can still see the blurring), and more than once I've ended up playing cutscenes from games over and over so I can show my friends where the codec artifacts are.
One ugly little spot lasting a fraction of a second would irritate me, but I'd live with it. I wonder how many there actually are in these movies, though - I'd probably see every one of them, and it might seriously detract from the movie >_< I don't know how sensitive you are or how many were actually in that movie, but some posters apparently have seen a *lot* of them.
Wireless isn't always great - at the place I work, we have 100mbit ethernet across the entire office and we *need* it. We're constantly sending large files around, and in fact, we've got the server on a gigabit switch (which means that when some of our programs run, now they bottleneck on hard drive speed instead of ethernet speed. IDE RAID just isn't fast enough.)
11mbit would be death to us. When it's easy to set up a wired network, I think it's definitely preferable.
"Hey, I just got a new Voodoo2! Yeah, I saw that TNT board, but that's just crazy. Nobody would buy an NVidia board, 3dfx is king."
"So you heard about 3dfx dying? Yeah, who woulda thunk. I just bought myself a Geforce 2. Radeon? What's that? Who'd want an ATI board? NVidia rocks."
"Man, those GFFX benchmarks are terrible. So much for NVidia. I'm happy with my Radeon 9700 Pro. Hey, did you hear about that new S3 chip? Ha ha. Idiots. There's no *way* they could break into this market."
I wonder how much it would cost to plate it with solar panels, and what kind of efficiency boosts you'd get. And how long it would take to get a full charge, of course.
Assuming it's like a normal Topcoder match (which I honestly don't know), you'll have to write a class with a member function that takes parameters. The parameters might be ints, or might be strings, vectors, or vectors of strings. Plus, you'll have to return something that might be any of those. However it's pretty trivial to convert from those to whatever C-compatible format you want - so with a little C++ glue around your C code, yes, it would indeed be doable.
Define "making money from spam". Then prove that a given spammer is, in fact, making money from spam. Then demonstrate that it's possible to track the spammer down and prove (1) that they were the person sending spam, and (2) that they were the one profiting off it.
.
I can just see it - people start sending out thousands of emails advertising Britney Spears' newest album, in an attempt to get her arrested for spamming . .
Saying "making money from spam should be made illegal" is all very nice, but unfortunately, the reality of implementing that is *much* nastier.
The CPU time isn't always cheaper than the bandwidth. Some sites get cheap bandwidth and serve a ludicrous number of database-driven pages that are slightly different from each other - they're designed so that the database servers can handle the load, but gzipping every single page absolutely slaughters the webservers, which are barely doing anything more than relaying requests back to the database servers and are *still* running at high load.
Good thing there's nobody working to make Linux easy for clueless users.
As for your first comment, that's what root exploits are for. Yes, they exist. Not many, but enough.
However, I personally have never seen a Linux box in use that was mounted off a CD. I know they exist, and yes, they'd be pretty secure - but I have never once seen one. Statistically insignificant.
I've actually gotten irritated enough with "Linux is more secure than anything!" zealots that I've considered writing a Linux worm. I seriously doubt it would be hard. Go find some old security advisories for Apache, SSL, and anything else you want. Hook together a Linux-killer worm that tries all of the exploits, installs a rootkit on the compromised system, and sets that one up to probe. If you wanted to be really evil, you could code it to start doing subtle damage after a week - wiping random passwords, deleting random files in user's directories, and so forth. After a few months it could start causing kernel panics if you wanted.
Would it work? Of course it would work. For all the "Linux is secure!" talk going on, what they really mean is "Linux is secure if it's patched up to the most recent versions" (curiously enough, this is the same as Windows). I'll bet you cold hard cash that there are plenty of old unmodified Redhat 5.0 systems out there. How many root exploits have been found in the last few years? How many holes have there been in Apache, SSL, Samba, any other program that's installed by default?
Nobody's done it yet - but that doesn't mean it's not possible.
The only reason I haven't written the worm is because, in the end, I'd cause a whole lot of financial problems and headaches for a lot of people who didn't deserve it. I'd love to prove Linux doesn't have intrinsic perfect security, but I don't want to actually do damage to prove it.
But just wait - someone's going to do this someday. In fact, for all you know, somebody already *has* - they've just programmed it to be unbelievably stealthy and only target systems that the admin hasn't logged onto in months.
Go on - prove it's impossible. I dare you.
I, personally, went into the STL headers and added a #define to range-check operator[]. I turn it on when I'm willing to take the speed hit and turn it off otherwise.
:P
Headers aren't sacred.
I think the *real* motives of Jack Thompson should be obvious to everyone. You see, he thinks his game was poorly recieved, and he's merely trying to exterminate all the competition.
Wait, you say you didn't know he was in a game? Haven't you ever played The Bermuda Syndrome?
The Bermuda Syndrome basically chronicles the adventures of pilot Jack J. Thompson . . . Final Grade: D
A shoddy disguise at best - all he did is remove his middle initial! Who was he hoping to fool, anyway?
(Moral: You can find facts to back up *anything* on Google.)
Only with untrusted computers, remember. I run a small distributed network at my workplace (the 30 CPUs in the office, about half of which are in the render farm) and don't bother to doublecheck work - if it's wrong, it's my code at fault, and doing it again won't change anything. Nobody's hacking my client for credit - there *isn't* any credit.
I work at Snowblind Studios, and we're not doing the Fallout game. That's somebody else. Just FYI :P
No it isn't, it takes, like, five seconds to start. Or more.
Yeah, it's a stupid reason - but I tried it once, and it irritated me so much to have to *wait* for my web browser to load that I switched back.
IE does what I need, and it loads instantly. Mozilla does what I need, and it takes five seconds. Game, set, and match, IE. :P
I have the fundamental belief that the best product will, in fact, win - and that if you think the best product isn't win, perhaps it's a good idea to look at your definition of "best". As a gamer and a casual user, Windows is better than Linux. As a casual impatient web user, IE is better than Mozilla. If I was a coder who wanted to be able to play with the source of my programs, my priorities would be different - however, I'm not, and most people aren't.
Instead of saying "$OPENSOURCEPACKAGE$ is better than $MSPACKAGE$" people should really be asking why the MS software is still being used - the answers would probably surprise then. Until then, I predict MS will remain in the lead, which is a pity because I really do like the open-source philosophy a lot better.
"My bike? It's a Harley. Well . . . it's Harley-compatible."
-Mystery Men
Wow, things really *are* different in Australia!
(sorry. cheap shot against America. couldn't resist. :P)
2001:04b0:1e41:23ab:9090:263f:94b3:1202
Like that.
Yes, that's hexadecimal - yes, that's 16 bytes.
(That's also part of the registered AOL/Time Warner block, incidentally.)
Interviewer: Doing this specific activity breaks the law. Right?
P2P-lover: Well, only insofar as the law is evil and wrong.
RIAA: Yes! You will all be sent to the Underworld!
------
Interviewer: I want to be able to do anything I want. What do you think?
P2P-lover: Sure, why should I care?
RIAA: No! We demand your cash in retribution!
------
Is there a *single* interview question here that asks an interesting question, or one that there's any question about the answer to? P2P person says that anything that stifles the free flow of information is bad. RIAA person says that anything that allows people to make illegal copies of music is bad. RIAA person makes no comments about whether the current copyright situation is for the benefit of the people of America or not, P2P person doesn't mention minor details like, say, what's actually legal.
I'm trying to see where the story is.