breaking backwards compatibility is what makes linux 's code much more elegant and easier to maintain than the windows source. But of course it's much harder to get a fixed version of some obscure piece of proprietary software, made by a company that maybe doesn't even exist anymore, than it is to recompile a piece of free software (or even fix it yourself). Another problem is that lots of people are still running windows 9x or will not install service packs. so the worms won't go away overnight. It's a step in the right direction by microsoft, but if it breaks too many old apps, a lot of people might get pissed off and give linux a try.
The point of open source is, that if you really care about it, you've got the source and can add whatever features you need. Compare that to the situation of using proprietary software when the company who made it went out of buisness, or does not support it anymore.
A friend of mine bougth a PS2 for cheap in China about a year ago. He said that it wasn't imported, it was made in a factory in China but left it through the back door:) Even in China you can't evade the laws of supply and demand:)
Who buys cd singles anyway? I own about 200 CDs and just a single one of them is a single, and that one I didn't buy but won it at a competition (listened to it exactly once)... I mean, why should I buy someone's CD, if they aren't capable of producing more than just a single song I like? Sure, I own some CDs with some less than perfect tracks on them, but none so bad that I have to skip them. I always listen to my CDs from start to finish, and very often the songs I don't like so much on first listen are the ones which become my favourites after a while. And the CDs which make me go WTF??? on first listen are the most rewarding for me in the long run once I understand what they're about. I really don't get the idea of buying a "hit" single. If I wanted to hear that kind of stuff, I'd just turn on the radio or buy a TV.
heh, as a student of Chinese, it took me three times of reading your comment until I got the joke. Because if you pronounce Yu properly, it doesn't sound at all like "you", more like you'd read yu in German (don't know how to describe that sound to someone speaking english only...)
aaaaaaaaaaaah, slashcode keeps eating my chinese characters!
If you want to enter them yourself in the searchengine (can't link to it), the unicode sequences for the word aids are the following: 艾滋病
The chinese word for AIDS is (ai4zi1bing4), searching for which brings up 588 entries, like for example www.aids.net.cn or www.aidsonline.com.cn. Probably still not as much as appropriate, but better than one.
The reason for go programs not being able to compete with Lee Chang Ho, Lee Se Dol, Chang Hao, Yamashita Keigo or even the average club player in the west is not that it's boring to write go programs. Lot's of smart people have tried and failed. It won't happen anytime soon. There was a prize of 1 million $ for the program who beats any professional player till the year 2000. The guy sponsoring the prize has died since, but be assured that in east Asia go players are at least as famous and good for publicity as Kasparov and Kramnik in the west (there is a TV channel in Korea showing go (Baduk in Korean) games all day) and a computer competing with even experienced amateur players would be quite a big sensation.
I needed half a year of playing experience until I could beat gnugo (the best program available for free) consistently. The reason for that is that it's very hard to compute whether a certain move is good or bad. So instead of trying out every possible move and evaluating the resulting position like in chess (which is impossible due to huge number of possible variations), most programs take the approach of trying to emulate the way a human plays the game. Usually there are several modules analyzing the board from different points of view, each suggesting a move (e.g. a "defend weak groups" module, a "attack" module, "territorry expansion" module etc.) and try to evaluate the resulting positions. This results in the program often missing the best moves. While in chess it is difficult for even the best players to calculate more that a few moves ahead, go stones once placed don't move, which makes it easy to visualize added stones. For professional go players it's no big deal to read 100 moves deep, pruning the huge search tree with intuition gained through experience. To read that deep for a computer is just impossible. With a bit of experience, humans develop an intuition for which shapes are weak and will get in trouble eventually and which are strong. Go programs often don't even realize that they are being attacked until it is too late to do anything about it. Some programs have a database with good and bad patterns, but as soon as one makes a moves outside the book, one sees that the program doesn't know why the shape it plays was good and can't utilize the strength. The day a computer program will compete with professional go players, AI in general will have made a lot of progress.
Re:For The Complete Star Wars Obsessive...
on
Star Wars Origami
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· Score: 1
There are lots of movies made all over the world. Most of them do not have millions of dollars to burn on special effects and famous actors. But a lot of them I way prefer to the shiny, but shallow stuff Hollywood produces. Luckily where I live there are about 3 theaters which show indie and foreign movies only (I'm glad that the urban Swiss people prefer subtitled to dubbed movies). You can also get a lot of good movies on DVD. You can get movies from all over the world, from the last 70 or 80 years. Lots of movies have been made where the makers actually cared about making a good film more than they cared about making lots of money. Old films may lack special effects and seem slow compared todays MTV-editing-style, but they often have an interesting story to tell and great acting. For example I'm a big fan of Akira Kurosawa, who has been making movies for about 50 years. Not only are his movies well written and acted, he also is a master of editing and directing. What he was able to achieve with just black and white cameras puts any special effects orgy to shame. Unfortunately, few cinemas show older, lesser known movies, so the only way to see them is to order them on DVD.
Well, the difference between the US and most other countries (I guess including Finland) is, that you don't sue people for rediculous sums of money. You may get the actual damage (like real, proven damage to your bank account or your property, not like "I spilled a cup of your too hot coffee on myself, I want $ x million"), but no more than that. You can't make a living out of winning a stupid court case.
It would rather be drop than pick... but pushing the ground would probably work best, I think (don't know the appropriate physics terms in english, so I'm not going into any detail)
You buy a CD if it has only three good songs on it? What a waste of money! I own about 200 CDs, and there are maybe 20 or so among them, where I actually skip some tracks because I don't like them, and I don't listen to those often. Otherwise I always listen to CDs from beginning to end. There is LOTS of good music out there, you just don't get it shoved down your throats by big companies. You have to actually go looking for it (on the internet, in good record stores (those which don't have the top 40 crap and who let you listen to a CD before you buy it) etc.). But then again, some of what I consider good music, others consider unlistenable noise, so YMMV.
My physics teacher in high school did all the tests "open book". You could use whatever you wanted. I loved this kind of test. This way you actually get tested on whether you UNDERSTAND what you were taught, and not whether you can memorize a lot of stuff overnight, as unfortunately most other tests are. I don't like memorizing stuff (I tried to get through those king of tests with logical thinking too) and I always understood the phyiscs I was taught (he was a really great teacher, and he was really obsessed with physics {"there are three important things in my life: 1. Physics, 2. Physics, 3. Physics") and could show one the beauty behind it all), so the tests were always a lot of fun for me, since the questions were usually a bit challenging, but I could look up all the formulas and stuff I needed, and usually got a very good grade. But most people were absolutely frightened of these tests, because they usually got through tests with memorization skills, even if they didn't understand the subject matter at all. (Though sometimes the method of getting all the physics tests about that subject from the previous few years and hoping that some of the questions will be the same worked for them as well). I'd really love to see these kind of tests used more widely, and I think it would help a lot to raise the quality of education.
Even more OT, but just a slight correction: In the Go rating system, after 1 kyu there is 1 dan - 7 dan amateur, then there's a gap of about 2 stones (difference in rating equals the number of handicap stones required to make a fair game), then come the pros, who don't use handicap, but 1 rank difference among pros is about 1/4 of a stone. So beating a pro player is even harder than in the rating system you describe.
Also the level of Go programs is to be taken with a grain of salt, because if you play a lot of games against them, even weaker players will discover the weaknesses of the program and exploit them (often playing unorthodox but still not bad moves does the trick), which always works because the programs don't learn from their mistakes.
For a program to beat a pro player, faster hardware won't be of any use. What's needed is a major breakthrough in AI software technology, which may not happen anytime soon. Also the advantage of brute force looking ahead isn't that great for computers, since professionals routinely read 100 moves ahead (which makes some pro games very hard to understand for a lowly amateur as myself (~12 kyu)).
While I agree that confield is not the best starting point to get into Autechre's music, I can't understand why so many Autechre fans don't like it. The first few times I listened to it, I didn't like it that much either, but once you get to know the tracks a bit better, it becomes a really great album. Easily my favourite Autechre (I haven't heard Amber and Incunabula).
Another of my favourite electronic music groups I haven't seen mentioned is the german duo Mouse On Mars. While their music is quite complex as well, it has a very organic, natural feel to it. Everything I've heard from them is great, my favourite being "Niun niggung". Should you ever get the chance to see them live, by all means do so. I've seen them last year and it was on of the greatest concerts I've ever seen. They play with a real drummer (and singer on a few songs) and one of the two regular guys plays the bass, while the other is responsible for all the electronic equipment.
Me and my friends once were major Ultima Online addicts, but we (about 5 guys with 3 internet connections (back in the days when 28'8 modems were the fastest thing available (at least for us))) had only one account to share. The accounts worked the same way as in asherons call: the one who logs on later kicks out the one who is logged in. So we had long fights, kicking each other out until someone gave up. It was especially funny if our character was involved in a fight while we were fighting about who can play.
Slashdot Mirror
I even got it to run on my 386/25 with 4 megs of ram. required a good deal of autoexec.bat and config.sys hacking though. Aaah, those were the days...
I'm not that sure if stopping MS is such a bad thing economy wise. In the long run, everybody switching to something more productive will pay off.
breaking backwards compatibility is what makes linux 's code much more elegant and easier to maintain than the windows source. But of course it's much harder to get a fixed version of some obscure piece of proprietary software, made by a company that maybe doesn't even exist anymore, than it is to recompile a piece of free software (or even fix it yourself). Another problem is that lots of people are still running windows 9x or will not install service packs. so the worms won't go away overnight. It's a step in the right direction by microsoft, but if it breaks too many old apps, a lot of people might get pissed off and give linux a try.
The point of open source is, that if you really care about it, you've got the source and can add whatever features you need. Compare that to the situation of using proprietary software when the company who made it went out of buisness, or does not support it anymore.
A friend of mine bougth a PS2 for cheap in China about a year ago. He said that it wasn't imported, it was made in a factory in China but left it through the back door :) Even in China you can't evade the laws of supply and demand :)
Who buys cd singles anyway? I own about 200 CDs and just a single one of them is a single, and that one I didn't buy but won it at a competition (listened to it exactly once)... I mean, why should I buy someone's CD, if they aren't capable of producing more than just a single song I like? Sure, I own some CDs with some less than perfect tracks on them, but none so bad that I have to skip them. I always listen to my CDs from start to finish, and very often the songs I don't like so much on first listen are the ones which become my favourites after a while. And the CDs which make me go WTF??? on first listen are the most rewarding for me in the long run once I understand what they're about.
I really don't get the idea of buying a "hit" single. If I wanted to hear that kind of stuff, I'd just turn on the radio or buy a TV.
note to self: use the preview button. Slash keeps eating my umlauts for some reason, so just imagine yu with two dots on top of the u
heh, as a student of Chinese, it took me three times of reading your comment until I got the joke. Because if you pronounce Yu properly, it doesn't sound at all like "you", more like you'd read yu in German (don't know how to describe that sound to someone speaking english only...)
aaaaaaaaaaaah, slashcode keeps eating my chinese characters!
If you want to enter them yourself in the searchengine (can't link to it), the unicode sequences for the word aids are the following: 艾滋病
The chinese word for AIDS is (ai4zi1bing4), searching for which brings up 588 entries, like for example www.aids.net.cn or www.aidsonline.com.cn. Probably still not as much as appropriate, but better than one.
The reason for go programs not being able to compete with Lee Chang Ho, Lee Se Dol, Chang Hao, Yamashita Keigo or even the average club player in the west is not that it's boring to write go programs. Lot's of smart people have tried and failed. It won't happen anytime soon. There was a prize of 1 million $ for the program who beats any professional player till the year 2000. The guy sponsoring the prize has died since, but be assured that in east Asia go players are at least as famous and good for publicity as Kasparov and Kramnik in the west (there is a TV channel in Korea showing go (Baduk in Korean) games all day) and a computer competing with even experienced amateur players would be quite a big sensation.
I needed half a year of playing experience until I could beat gnugo (the best program available for free) consistently. The reason for that is that it's very hard to compute whether a certain move is good or bad. So instead of trying out every possible move and evaluating the resulting position like in chess (which is impossible due to huge number of possible variations), most programs take the approach of trying to emulate the way a human plays the game. Usually there are several modules analyzing the board from different points of view, each suggesting a move (e.g. a "defend weak groups" module, a "attack" module, "territorry expansion" module etc.) and try to evaluate the resulting positions. This results in the program often missing the best moves.
While in chess it is difficult for even the best players to calculate more that a few moves ahead, go stones once placed don't move, which makes it easy to visualize added stones. For professional go players it's no big deal to read 100 moves deep, pruning the huge search tree with intuition gained through experience. To read that deep for a computer is just impossible. With a bit of experience, humans develop an intuition for which shapes are weak and will get in trouble eventually and which are strong. Go programs often don't even realize that they are being attacked until it is too late to do anything about it. Some programs have a database with good and bad patterns, but as soon as one makes a moves outside the book, one sees that the program doesn't know why the shape it plays was good and can't utilize the strength. The day a computer program will compete with professional go players, AI in general will have made a lot of progress.
Somebody should tell this guy about aalib
I don't care at all, but it's spelled Schwarzenegger
There are lots of movies made all over the world. Most of them do not have millions of dollars to burn on special effects and famous actors. But a lot of them I way prefer to the shiny, but shallow stuff Hollywood produces.
Luckily where I live there are about 3 theaters which show indie and foreign movies only (I'm glad that the urban Swiss people prefer subtitled to dubbed movies).
You can also get a lot of good movies on DVD. You can get movies from all over the world, from the last 70 or 80 years. Lots of movies have been made where the makers actually cared about making a good film more than they cared about making lots of money. Old films may lack special effects and seem slow compared todays MTV-editing-style, but they often have an interesting story to tell and great acting. For example I'm a big fan of Akira Kurosawa, who has been making movies for about 50 years. Not only are his movies well written and acted, he also is a master of editing and directing. What he was able to achieve with just black and white cameras puts any special effects orgy to shame. Unfortunately, few cinemas show older, lesser known movies, so the only way to see them is to order them on DVD.
Well, the difference between the US and most other countries (I guess including Finland) is, that you don't sue people for rediculous sums of money. You may get the actual damage (like real, proven damage to your bank account or your property, not like "I spilled a cup of your too hot coffee on myself, I want $ x million"), but no more than that. You can't make a living out of winning a stupid court case.
I'd consider the universe to be the oldest experiment that I know of, or is it just a very elaborate joke?
It would rather be drop than pick... but pushing the ground would probably work best, I think (don't know the appropriate physics terms in english, so I'm not going into any detail)
You buy a CD if it has only three good songs on it? What a waste of money! I own about 200 CDs, and there are maybe 20 or so among them, where I actually skip some tracks because I don't like them, and I don't listen to those often. Otherwise I always listen to CDs from beginning to end. There is LOTS of good music out there, you just don't get it shoved down your throats by big companies. You have to actually go looking for it (on the internet, in good record stores (those which don't have the top 40 crap and who let you listen to a CD before you buy it) etc.). But then again, some of what I consider good music, others consider unlistenable noise, so YMMV.
My physics teacher in high school did all the tests "open book". You could use whatever you wanted. I loved this kind of test. This way you actually get tested on whether you UNDERSTAND what you were taught, and not whether you can memorize a lot of stuff overnight, as unfortunately most other tests are. I don't like memorizing stuff (I tried to get through those king of tests with logical thinking too) and I always understood the phyiscs I was taught (he was a really great teacher, and he was really obsessed with physics {"there are three important things in my life: 1. Physics, 2. Physics, 3. Physics") and could show one the beauty behind it all), so the tests were always a lot of fun for me, since the questions were usually a bit challenging, but I could look up all the formulas and stuff I needed, and usually got a very good grade. But most people were absolutely frightened of these tests, because they usually got through tests with memorization skills, even if they didn't understand the subject matter at all. (Though sometimes the method of getting all the physics tests about that subject from the previous few years and hoping that some of the questions will be the same worked for them as well).
I'd really love to see these kind of tests used more widely, and I think it would help a lot to raise the quality of education.
Even more OT, but just a slight correction: In the Go rating system, after 1 kyu there is 1 dan - 7 dan amateur, then there's a gap of about 2 stones (difference in rating equals the number of handicap stones required to make a fair game), then come the pros, who don't use handicap, but 1 rank difference among pros is about 1/4 of a stone. So beating a pro player is even harder than in the rating system you describe.
Also the level of Go programs is to be taken with a grain of salt, because if you play a lot of games against them, even weaker players will discover the weaknesses of the program and exploit them (often playing unorthodox but still not bad moves does the trick), which always works because the programs don't learn from their mistakes.
For a program to beat a pro player, faster hardware won't be of any use. What's needed is a major breakthrough in AI software technology, which may not happen anytime soon. Also the advantage of brute force looking ahead isn't that great for computers, since professionals routinely read 100 moves ahead (which makes some pro games very hard to understand for a lowly amateur as myself (~12 kyu)).
While I agree that confield is not the best starting point to get into Autechre's music, I can't understand why so many Autechre fans don't like it. The first few times I listened to it, I didn't like it that much either, but once you get to know the tracks a bit better, it becomes a really great album. Easily my favourite Autechre (I haven't heard Amber and Incunabula).
Another of my favourite electronic music groups I haven't seen mentioned is the german duo Mouse On Mars. While their music is quite complex as well, it has a very organic, natural feel to it. Everything I've heard from them is great, my favourite being "Niun niggung".
Should you ever get the chance to see them live, by all means do so. I've seen them last year and it was on of the greatest concerts I've ever seen. They play with a real drummer (and singer on a few songs) and one of the two regular guys plays the bass, while the other is responsible for all the electronic equipment.
I did expert it in 1:55, intermediate in 0:32 and beginner in 0:03 (just luck).
Me and my friends once were major Ultima Online addicts, but we (about 5 guys with 3 internet connections (back in the days when 28'8 modems were the fastest thing available (at least for us))) had only one account to share. The accounts worked the same way as in asherons call: the one who logs on later kicks out the one who is logged in. So we had long fights, kicking each other out until someone gave up. It was especially funny if our character was involved in a fight while we were fighting about who can play.
There's an unlimited supply of guides hidden in the rulers at the side of the images. Just drag a few of them out onto the image.