I'm one of those weird people who consider a fancy interface with no engine nothing more than eye-candy. Although Mac-OS X is a decent under the hood, I can't help but fear that developers will now target their products towards monkeys who like shinny objects.
If I waltz into a Gun warehouse, pick up a gun, give the guard the thumbs up, and then go blast away a couple innocent victims, then it is the warehouse as well as myself who are to blame, right?
It is my understanding that Xing's DVD player had the key in cleartext, making it trivial to make DeCSS. In fact, one could argue that if it wasn't done by a 16 year old child, then it would have been done eventually, perhaps by somebody with less aimable motives. Where is Xing's liability in all this?
I'm a CS major at ASU, and I'm currently taking CSE 240, Introduction to Programming Languages. There, one is taught Lisp, Prolog, and Ada.
Concerning Lisp, I personally thought the language obscure and very hard to get used to. Recursion everywhere and a minimalistic view towards variables isn't easy to adopt. However, after a couple weeks, I began to appreciate how elegant certain solutions to common programming exercises were. For example, I wrote an expression evaluator which does everything but order of operations in thirteen lines of code. Try doing that in C. I've also heard that Lisp is a very popular language, if not the language to use for AI because of the ability to modify code at runtime. Functional languages definitely have their uses.
"If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
Cheers
Using Trees Aren't an Option
on
Solving Chess?
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· Score: 2
A lot of posts here deal with the impossibility of a brute force attack in repsect to a perfect game. Citing examples such as the amount of energy from the sun, 34^100 nodes, and other crazy numbers seem abound here. However, to put things in perspective, take Kasparov's mind. How many atoms do you think that's made of? How many atoms in that gray mass of his are actually working on solving a particlar game of chess? I'm not suggesting that his games are perfect, far from that, but if the human mind were to be modeled someday, and then perfected for a game of chess (true AI), computers would come very close to producing a perfect game. Heck, if quantum computing ever gets off the ground in a pratical means, maybe the question will become moot, and other recursive problems like "What will LA look like after a 30 mega ton nuke is dropped?" will be the challenge. Peace, Nic
Anybody here ever though of the possibility that the difference between these two chips is software driver enabling???? Maybe that's why the driver's source code is so protected, because not doing so would endanger their $600+ graphic card market. I dunno, just a speculation.
Pretty much all game developers expect their users to have some version of DirectX. Whether DirectX comes via a CD, or a huge download, if the user wants to play the game, they'll install it.
The same could be said for your product and the JRE. If it's worth their time to install the JRE, they'll do it. Besides, the current version of the JRE (1.3 RC2) is quoted at being ~5MB, and that isn't horrible. As long as you streamline the installation so that the JRE seems to be behind the scenes, most people won't care that much.
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I'm one of those weird people who consider a fancy interface with no engine nothing more than eye-candy. Although Mac-OS X is a decent under the hood, I can't help but fear that developers will now target their products towards monkeys who like shinny objects.
ALL other solutions are either impractical or can be circumvented, perhaps by just pencil and paper :)
Preferably Guiness. You know Alan has it drippin from his beard.
*burp*
It is my understanding that Xing's DVD player had the key in cleartext, making it trivial to make DeCSS. In fact, one could argue that if it wasn't done by a 16 year old child, then it would have been done eventually, perhaps by somebody with less aimable motives. Where is Xing's liability in all this?
Concerning Lisp, I personally thought the language obscure and very hard to get used to. Recursion everywhere and a minimalistic view towards variables isn't easy to adopt. However, after a couple weeks, I began to appreciate how elegant certain solutions to common programming exercises were. For example, I wrote an expression evaluator which does everything but order of operations in thirteen lines of code. Try doing that in C. I've also heard that Lisp is a very popular language, if not the language to use for AI because of the ability to modify code at runtime. Functional languages definitely have their uses.
"If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
Cheers
A lot of posts here deal with the impossibility of a brute force attack in repsect to a perfect game. Citing examples such as the amount of energy from the sun, 34^100 nodes, and other crazy numbers seem abound here. However, to put things in perspective, take Kasparov's mind. How many atoms do you think that's made of? How many atoms in that gray mass of his are actually working on solving a particlar game of chess? I'm not suggesting that his games are perfect, far from that, but if the human mind were to be modeled someday, and then perfected for a game of chess (true AI), computers would come very close to producing a perfect game. Heck, if quantum computing ever gets off the ground in a pratical means, maybe the question will become moot, and other recursive problems like "What will LA look like after a 30 mega ton nuke is dropped?" will be the challenge. Peace, Nic
Anybody here ever though of the possibility that the difference between these two chips is software driver enabling???? Maybe that's why the driver's source code is so protected, because not doing so would endanger their $600+ graphic card market. I dunno, just a speculation.
Pretty much all game developers expect their users to have some version of DirectX. Whether DirectX comes via a CD, or a huge download, if the user wants to play the game, they'll install it.
The same could be said for your product and the JRE. If it's worth their time to install the JRE, they'll do it. Besides, the current version of the JRE (1.3 RC2) is quoted at being ~5MB, and that isn't horrible. As long as you streamline the installation so that the JRE seems to be behind the scenes, most people won't care that much.