I don't mind the monthly fee for one TV. The problem is that this family of five has five TVs (!), and paying $13 X 5 = $65/month in is much harder to justify. So we only have TiVo service for one TV, and the others are TiVoless.:-( Multiple TVs is also the reason I have analog cable instead of satellite or digital cable.
I ran XFree86 on my 486/66 with 16MB of RAM.. no swapping. At work, where I have 384MB of RAM, X is using 138M. At home, where I have 512MB of RAM, X is using 276M. There's something weird about X and Linux where X gets all your extra memory, which is really misleading.:(
Re:Hell, I remember when Yahoo was the best.
on
Altavista Renewed
·
· Score: 1
I used to send them all my spam, but like you, I started wondering what they did with it. I think I'd start sending them spam if they sent me a summary monthly of:
You sent us 1385 spam messages.
We had not seen 18 of them before.
We prosecuted 58 of the spammers:
13 were shot
19 were beheaded
26 were forced to read spam in prison
They'd probably get a lot better response rate that way.
I find Times New Roman much harder to read on screen than Georgia, at least at small point sizes. Times was designed to be thin so that The Times could fit more text at the same point size into their newspaper. I'd rather have easier to read text and scroll a bit. Georgia is also hinted very well. I also have a personal preference for fonts that have large lowercase letters. Since font size is based on uppercase letters, and most text is lowercase, having large lowercase (relative to the full text height) makes things easier to read. I also have a preference for lines being rendered at 1 pixel width.
See this page for some screenshots. You'll see that in Times, some areas look darker than the rest. Look at the word "The" for example. Things like that distract me while reading.
No, they don't sell any of the search result slots. They sell ads above and to the right of the search results, but these do not affect the search results themselves.
I'd prefer that they don't share too much, or we'll only have one set of search results across all search engines. Then when one engine doesn't find what I need, I will have no place to turn!
Galeon lets you both define keywords (I type 'gg pigeons' to search for pigeons, 'groups pigeons' to view usenet messages about pigeons, 'images pigeons' to run image search for pigeons, and 'imdb pigeons' to find movies about pigeons) and redefine handlers, using gnome. To set up handlers, go into the Gnome settings -> URL Handlers. Create a new handler foo that runs xterm. (The UI is icky -- you put in a handler name, put in the command, and click Set to add it to the list.) Then in Galeon, put in foo: as the URL and it will launch an xterm. At work, I used this to set up a todo list as my home page, and the "URLs" launch the commands that help me do my work.
Humans are really good at recognizing patterns. Computers find this hard. So in games that involve lots of objects that implicitly form some larger structure (units that form armies, buildings that form cities, mountains that form mountain ranges, etc.) humans will have an advantage in that they see the larger structure, while the computer sees the individual objects and can only guess at larger structures.
Computers are good at micromanaging individual objects, while humans get tired/bored of it.
So you often end up with humans winning because of strategy or computers winning because of brute force (perhaps because their cities/units are more efficiently managed).
An additional problem is that the human can not only see the patterns in the game, but also the patterns in the computer play. Once you see the pattern, you work out a strategy to beat it. Having a computer reason about strategies is hard.
One thing I've wondered about is whether we should be designing games that take into account the computer's strengths and weaknesses. The problem is that I don't want to play a game that's geared towards the computer's strength (lots of micromanagement). But there could be other things that could help the computer play better. Kohan for example has explicit groups of units. It's more convenient for the human to deal with. Does it also help the computer AI play better? Hmm.
One of the main goals of AI in games is to make the computer do things that look like a reasonable person (not necessarily an opponent) would have done them. It doesn't matter if the underlying models are elegant or extensible or whatever. It just needs to make the game fun. But in academic AI, what matters is to get good models, good theory, etc. Academic AI is geared towards the long run. Game AI can be really simple -- for example, you could watch how 100 humans play the game, and try to encode their strategies into the computer player. That kind of "AI" would be uninteresting to academic researchers, but it could make for a fun game.
Re:Laundry list for the galeon-dev folk reading
on
Galeon 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
Try this: Tools -> Javascript Console, then in that window, use Mozilla's menu, not Galeon's, to Tasks -> Navigator. Mozilla sidebar, in Galeon.
Warning: it's not supported, it's likely to crash, etc. But hey, it looks cool!
I love the tabs. They have really changed the way I surf the web. I middle-click on everything that looks interesting, and it loads in the background while I continue reading the page.
The bookmark editor is so easy to use. I don't have to bring up a new window to edit each bookmark's properties.
Being a GNOME app has some advantages. Tear-off menus are really nice. You can tear off a bookmark folder for example. Another GNOME (or Gtk?) feature is that you can assign hotkeys to any menu item. Since bookmarks are menu items, you can assign hotkeys to them.
Right-click to go back a page is a nice feature. It's really handy for surfing, as I don't have to move the mouse pointer all the way to the left corner to click on the back button, nor do I have to use the keyboard.
Even better, you can detach the menubar that has the Java/Javascript settings, and then you can leave it floating on the side and turn things on/off really easily.
During the Gulf War we got some pretty optimistic reports about how well our targetting systems worked and how they only hit military targets. I wonder how this "war" will go.
Can anyone here distinguish the night vision shown by CNN for the Taliban attack from the stuff shown for the Iraq attack? I guess Iraq had taller buildings.
Try to imagine somebody at some company going to a VC with a business plan of "we're going to do something that will require the user to download a plugin and it will do the same thing Java does."
It's called Curl. And they told the VCs that they're going to charge by the byte. Really.
It's not just the web. Why do people still watch 2D movies and read 2D books? Why are so many top seller computer games 2D (SimCity, Civilization, Roller Coaster Tycoon)?
Your eyes view the world in 2D (plus depth), not full 3D. Monitors are 2D. Trying to stuff a 3D world through a 2D pipe means you lose data. For example, unless you're a hyperdimensional being, you can't see what's behind something without rearranging the data. It's "cool" but it's also a pain at times. If there's no good need/benefit for 3D, then using 3D is often worse than the 2D version. Most everything I do on the web doesn't benefit from 3D. I'd rather get the 2D version.
Billion has "bi", which means two; Trillion has "tri", which means three. Million's "M" is likely related to "mono", which means one. But one of what? Two of what?
They're counting groups of six zeros.
My theory is that back during the American Revolution, most people didn't use numbers so large and didn't learn what a billion was. Just like these days most people don't learn what a hacker is. A word used by a few can get corrupted when it becomes popularized.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't mind the monthly fee for one TV. The problem is that this family of five has five TVs (!), and paying $13 X 5 = $65/month in is much harder to justify. So we only have TiVo service for one TV, and the others are TiVoless. :-( Multiple TVs is also the reason I have analog cable instead of satellite or digital cable.
- Amit
I ran XFree86 on my 486/66 with 16MB of RAM .. no swapping. At work, where I have 384MB of RAM, X is using 138M. At home, where I have 512MB of RAM, X is using 276M. There's something weird about X and Linux where X gets all your extra memory, which is really misleading. :(
It was at yahoo.stanford.edu, not at Berkeley.
I used to send them all my spam, but like you, I started wondering what they did with it. I think I'd start sending them spam if they sent me a summary monthly of:
You sent us 1385 spam messages.
We had not seen 18 of them before.
We prosecuted 58 of the spammers:
13 were shot
19 were beheaded
26 were forced to read spam in prison
They'd probably get a lot better response rate that way.
- Amit
I am totally addicted to Progress Quest. :-( I dream of fetching the royal anvil.
- Amit
Maybe it will motivate them to become AI researchers.
- Amit
I find Times New Roman much harder to read on screen than Georgia, at least at small point sizes. Times was designed to be thin so that The Times could fit more text at the same point size into their newspaper. I'd rather have easier to read text and scroll a bit. Georgia is also hinted very well. I also have a personal preference for fonts that have large lowercase letters. Since font size is based on uppercase letters, and most text is lowercase, having large lowercase (relative to the full text height) makes things easier to read. I also have a preference for lines being rendered at 1 pixel width.
See this page for some screenshots. You'll see that in Times, some areas look darker than the rest. Look at the word "The" for example. Things like that distract me while reading.
- Amit
Also see http://www.google.com/mozilla/google-search.html
I found the shortcuts to be more useful than the browser buttons.
No, they don't sell any of the search result slots. They sell ads above and to the right of the search results, but these do not affect the search results themselves.
- Amit
I'd prefer that they don't share too much, or we'll only have one set of search results across all search engines. Then when one engine doesn't find what I need, I will have no place to turn!
- Amit
Galeon lets you both define keywords (I type 'gg pigeons' to search for pigeons, 'groups pigeons' to view usenet messages about pigeons, 'images pigeons' to run image search for pigeons, and 'imdb pigeons' to find movies about pigeons) and redefine handlers, using gnome. To set up handlers, go into the Gnome settings -> URL Handlers. Create a new handler foo that runs xterm. (The UI is icky -- you put in a handler name, put in the command, and click Set to add it to the list.) Then in Galeon, put in foo: as the URL and it will launch an xterm. At work, I used this to set up a todo list as my home page, and the "URLs" launch the commands that help me do my work.
Re: mass tactics
Humans are really good at recognizing patterns. Computers find this hard. So in games that involve lots of objects that implicitly form some larger structure (units that form armies, buildings that form cities, mountains that form mountain ranges, etc.) humans will have an advantage in that they see the larger structure, while the computer sees the individual objects and can only guess at larger structures.
Computers are good at micromanaging individual objects, while humans get tired/bored of it.
So you often end up with humans winning because of strategy or computers winning because of brute force (perhaps because their cities/units are more efficiently managed).
An additional problem is that the human can not only see the patterns in the game, but also the patterns in the computer play. Once you see the pattern, you work out a strategy to beat it. Having a computer reason about strategies is hard.
One thing I've wondered about is whether we should be designing games that take into account the computer's strengths and weaknesses. The problem is that I don't want to play a game that's geared towards the computer's strength (lots of micromanagement). But there could be other things that could help the computer play better. Kohan for example has explicit groups of units. It's more convenient for the human to deal with. Does it also help the computer AI play better? Hmm.
- Amit
One of the main goals of AI in games is to make the computer do things that look like a reasonable person (not necessarily an opponent) would have done them. It doesn't matter if the underlying models are elegant or extensible or whatever. It just needs to make the game fun. But in academic AI, what matters is to get good models, good theory, etc. Academic AI is geared towards the long run. Game AI can be really simple -- for example, you could watch how 100 humans play the game, and try to encode their strategies into the computer player. That kind of "AI" would be uninteresting to academic researchers, but it could make for a fun game.
Try this: Tools -> Javascript Console, then in that window, use Mozilla's menu, not Galeon's, to Tasks -> Navigator. Mozilla sidebar, in Galeon.
Warning: it's not supported, it's likely to crash, etc. But hey, it looks cool!
Another nifty feature: middle-click on the "New window" toolbar button to open the URL in a new tab.
I love the tabs. They have really changed the way I surf the web. I middle-click on everything that looks interesting, and it loads in the background while I continue reading the page.
The bookmark editor is so easy to use. I don't have to bring up a new window to edit each bookmark's properties.
Being a GNOME app has some advantages. Tear-off menus are really nice. You can tear off a bookmark folder for example. Another GNOME (or Gtk?) feature is that you can assign hotkeys to any menu item. Since bookmarks are menu items, you can assign hotkeys to them.
Right-click to go back a page is a nice feature. It's really handy for surfing, as I don't have to move the mouse pointer all the way to the left corner to click on the back button, nor do I have to use the keyboard.
- Amit
Even better, you can detach the menubar that has the Java/Javascript settings, and then you can leave it floating on the side and turn things on/off really easily.
Try Kylix spec|specs|specification|specifications. That way you don't get Kylix specials or other spec* words.
I highly recommend reading "The Hit Charade" on Wired. It explains why -- Altavista wants more page views to boost its stats.
XEmacs can be compiled as an Athena or Gtk widget so that it can be embedded into other apps. See this documentation and this screenshot
:)
I wish more apps would use XEmacs as the text editing widget.
During the Gulf War we got some pretty optimistic reports about how well our targetting systems worked and how they only hit military targets. I wonder how this "war" will go.
Can anyone here distinguish the night vision shown by CNN for the Taliban attack from the stuff shown for the Iraq attack? I guess Iraq had taller buildings.
- Amit
Try to imagine somebody at some company going to a VC with a business plan of "we're going to do something that will require the user to download a plugin and it will do the same thing Java does."
It's called Curl. And they told the VCs that they're going to charge by the byte. Really.
It's not just the web. Why do people still watch 2D movies and read 2D books? Why are so many top seller computer games 2D (SimCity, Civilization, Roller Coaster Tycoon)?
Your eyes view the world in 2D (plus depth), not full 3D. Monitors are 2D. Trying to stuff a 3D world through a 2D pipe means you lose data. For example, unless you're a hyperdimensional being, you can't see what's behind something without rearranging the data. It's "cool" but it's also a pain at times. If there's no good need/benefit for 3D, then using 3D is often worse than the 2D version. Most everything I do on the web doesn't benefit from 3D. I'd rather get the 2D version.
Read Jakob Nielsen for more thoughts on 3D vs. 2D.
- Amit
Billion has "bi", which means two; Trillion has "tri", which means three. Million's "M" is likely related to "mono", which means one. But one of what? Two of what?
They're counting groups of six zeros.
My theory is that back during the American Revolution, most people didn't use numbers so large and didn't learn what a billion was. Just like these days most people don't learn what a hacker is. A word used by a few can get corrupted when it becomes popularized.
A Google search for the phrase "Finnish Love Machine" finds one match.