Each dot on that image is a galaxy/star/something. The color of the dot is what's interesting -- the redder it is, typically the further away it is. If you look at the big image, there are a lot of dots, but they're only slightly reddish. The two "interesting" ones are extremely red, indicating that they're very far away. Astronomers have shown that, since the universe is expanding, things further away from us are moving away from us faster and faster. The end result is that the doppler shift caused towards the red end of the spectrum gives us a quick indication of how old things are, and hence, how interesting they might be.
It's mentioned that the stars are composed mainly of Hydrogen, which accounts for the red. Also, with something so far away, we see something called "red shift". Basically, things farther away from us are moving away from us faster than things close by. For things extremely far away, the red shift is caused by the doppler affect expanding the light waves and shifting the color towards the red end of the spectrum. Likewise, the few objects that are moving towards us experience a blue shift -- the light waves are slightly compressed. However, due to the expanding universe, this is very rare.
I can't be certain, but I'm pretty sure that the BIOS on my Inspiron 4000 lets me specify when speedstep takes affect (ie always slow, always fast, depends). At worst, boot it unplugged, then plug it in later.
Regarding your keyboard question, http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/contoured.htm has some great (though expensive) keyboards. They take some getting used to, but they're great once you do.
I personally think this is a very good move. The Zelda games on the N64 were fun to play, but another realistic Zelda game would be that -- just another Zelda game with nothing new to draw someone in (besides prettier graphics). A move to cartoonish graphics will give the designers more freedom in both how characters move and in how they respond. In Ocarina of Time, what would you have thought if Link's eyes bugged out when he saw Ganondorf for the first time? In the upcoming Gamecube version, this might not be so out of place. Furthermore, this should actually help draw players into the game more. With realistic models, facial features are smaller and thus are harder to pick up on. With a cartoony feel, it's incredibly easy to show what emotions the avatar is going through.
Not necessarily. There are rule based systems ("when I see X, I do Y"), and these can fall apart in unexpected situations. However, this is far from the only way to implement a system.
One method is with classifier systems, where you evolve the rules that determine the output based either directly on the input, or a chain leading from some input. It starts with a pool of random bit strings which are evolved based on their success. The rule used is determined by a bidding scheme.
Another method, which is about as general as you can get, is genetic programming (GP). GP involves creating a set of functions and terminals and randomly generating a set of parse trees using them. Each of these programs is evaluated, and based on that the standard genetic algorithm operations are performed for form a new generation. Essentially, genetic programming is automatic programming, if given the right function and terminal set. Unfortunately, it would probably be too slow a process for this competition.
Both of the above methods have been proved over and over again. Classifier systems, for instance, have been used to run a simulated oil pipeline (with leaks, blockages, etc). Starting from a random population, it achieved human competitive results. Genetic programming has produced results that are not only human-competitive, but also infringe on pre-existing patents.
These two things scare the heck out of me. Want to ship some plutonium across the country? You're going to have a good bit of paperwork to fill out. Want to ship some anthrax? Fill out a UPS bill and maybe put a biohazard sticker on the side (it may not be this easy, but this is what I've been told). Given the potential damage a biological organism could cause if it were introduced into a major population center, I really hope something comes of this.
Unisys is still selling the E7000 (I think that's what it's called), according to what I've heard they've sold ~300 of the machines and have partnered with Dell. They also just demoed the E7000 with Itanium processors at Intel's rollout (Yahoo Financial News, symbol UIS).
Actually, the ISPs couldn't do much about this due to either a bankruptcy law or a court order (can't recall right now). Essentially, ISPs were not allowed to start mass migrations away from NorthPoint because that would undermine NorthPoint's business and ensure that they would fail. Both my ISP (DSLi) and Telocity, and probably others, at least planned for this. As soon as NorthPoint got shut down, I called DSLi and was told I'll be back up on Rythms DSL by next Thursday.
IMHO, this is just plain wrong. It's *much* more important that you learn how to think algorithmically than to learn all the languages that are currently "hot". It's trite, but the important thing about college-level computer science curriculums is to learn how to keep learning. If you don't think so, go to DeVry.
Were I going back to school, the one thing I would look for is breadth in the curriculum. Am I going to be learning about the many different programming langauge paradigms? Am I going to have the opportunity to take classes in a range of areas (AI, systems, databases, graphics, HCI, theory, etc)? How much depth will I be going into in the various topics?
It's during on of the battle scenes on the Planet of Junk. They actually used the real version during that scene (lyrics and everything), while they used an instrumental version of it during another.
Actually, they've recently released a new server line (E7000, I believe). It's the only 32-way Pentium-III Xeon server. Right now it runs MS Win2K Data Center and is being sold by Unisys, Dell, and (I think) Compaq.
The only logical course of action, from a company stand point, is to sue. Consider the situation -- a free, potentially better product is coming up. If you can smear its name before it becomes widespread, mass market adoption is a lot less likely. The important part is the lawsuit -- winning or losing, in this case, is not. Sure some people will take to it, but wide support probably won't be there.
What would really be interesting is some statistics on how far the people got (but, they won't tell us for security reasons). Several years ago the DoD conducted a research project where they had people try to break into their systems called Elligible Receiver. http://www.soci.niu.edu/~crypt/other/eligib.htm has some good information about it.
Strength of software has *everything* to do with it. The reason Windows 3.1 beat OS/2 is *exactly* because of the software that ran on it. The same thing has happened over and over in the console world. Consider the Playstation vs the N64. N64 is tecnically superior, but it failed to get developer support and thus didn't have the number of big games that the PSX had.
IANAL, but I think the difference is that Napster is fully aware of the fact that people are illegally trading MP3s on their system. From what I've read, an ISP is responsible for its hosted content once it's been made aware of the problem.
Frankly, I'm not surprised giving where the information is coming from. One of the two writers works at an above-Top-Secret Institute for Defense Analyses super-computing facility. He probably spends most of his time researching number-crunching algorithms and the like.
One of the pages (or both, don't remember) mentions that somehow he's able to get the joint angles (or perhaps he does this via extrapolation given the length/orientation of the light saber). In any event, it's probably just straight-forward forward or inverse kinematics.
Slashdot Mirror
If you can afford $1.5M or more, you can probably afford a T1...
Each dot on that image is a galaxy/star/something. The color of the dot is what's interesting -- the redder it is, typically the further away it is. If you look at the big image, there are a lot of dots, but they're only slightly reddish. The two "interesting" ones are extremely red, indicating that they're very far away. Astronomers have shown that, since the universe is expanding, things further away from us are moving away from us faster and faster. The end result is that the doppler shift caused towards the red end of the spectrum gives us a quick indication of how old things are, and hence, how interesting they might be.
It's mentioned that the stars are composed mainly of Hydrogen, which accounts for the red. Also, with something so far away, we see something called "red shift". Basically, things farther away from us are moving away from us faster than things close by. For things extremely far away, the red shift is caused by the doppler affect expanding the light waves and shifting the color towards the red end of the spectrum. Likewise, the few objects that are moving towards us experience a blue shift -- the light waves are slightly compressed. However, due to the expanding universe, this is very rare.
I can't be certain, but I'm pretty sure that the BIOS on my Inspiron 4000 lets me specify when speedstep takes affect (ie always slow, always fast, depends). At worst, boot it unplugged, then plug it in later.
Regarding your keyboard question, http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/contoured.htm
has some great (though expensive) keyboards. They take some getting used to, but they're great once you do.
I personally think this is a very good move. The Zelda games on the N64 were fun to play, but another realistic Zelda game would be that -- just another Zelda game with nothing new to draw someone in (besides prettier graphics). A move to cartoonish graphics will give the designers more freedom in both how characters move and in how they respond. In Ocarina of Time, what would you have thought if Link's eyes bugged out when he saw Ganondorf for the first time? In the upcoming Gamecube version, this might not be so out of place. Furthermore, this should actually help draw players into the game more. With realistic models, facial features are smaller and thus are harder to pick up on. With a cartoony feel, it's incredibly easy to show what emotions the avatar is going through.
Actually, he'll probably go to jail for breaking SDMI first -- he was part of Prof. Felton's team too. Smart guy.
One method is with classifier systems, where you evolve the rules that determine the output based either directly on the input, or a chain leading from some input. It starts with a pool of random bit strings which are evolved based on their success. The rule used is determined by a bidding scheme.
Another method, which is about as general as you can get, is genetic programming (GP). GP involves creating a set of functions and terminals and randomly generating a set of parse trees using them. Each of these programs is evaluated, and based on that the standard genetic algorithm operations are performed for form a new generation. Essentially, genetic programming is automatic programming, if given the right function and terminal set. Unfortunately, it would probably be too slow a process for this competition.
Both of the above methods have been proved over and over again. Classifier systems, for instance, have been used to run a simulated oil pipeline (with leaks, blockages, etc). Starting from a random population, it achieved human competitive results. Genetic programming has produced results that are not only human-competitive, but also infringe on pre-existing patents.
These two things scare the heck out of me. Want to ship some plutonium across the country? You're going to have a good bit of paperwork to fill out. Want to ship some anthrax? Fill out a UPS bill and maybe put a biohazard sticker on the side (it may not be this easy, but this is what I've been told). Given the potential damage a biological organism could cause if it were introduced into a major population center, I really hope something comes of this.
Unisys is still selling the E7000 (I think that's what it's called), according to what I've heard they've sold ~300 of the machines and have partnered with Dell. They also just demoed the E7000 with Itanium processors at Intel's rollout (Yahoo Financial News, symbol UIS).
http://www.arsdigita.com/acs-repository/
Free, open-source, and GPL'd.
Oracle cost too much? http://www.openacs.org/ -- it uses PostgreSQL.
Actually, the ISPs couldn't do much about this due to either a bankruptcy law or a court order (can't recall right now). Essentially, ISPs were not allowed to start mass migrations away from NorthPoint because that would undermine NorthPoint's business and ensure that they would fail. Both my ISP (DSLi) and Telocity, and probably others, at least planned for this. As soon as NorthPoint got shut down, I called DSLi and was told I'll be back up on Rythms DSL by next Thursday.
IMHO, this is just plain wrong. It's *much* more important that you learn how to think algorithmically than to learn all the languages that are currently "hot". It's trite, but the important thing about college-level computer science curriculums is to learn how to keep learning. If you don't think so, go to DeVry.
Were I going back to school, the one thing I would look for is breadth in the curriculum. Am I going to be learning about the many different programming langauge paradigms? Am I going to have the opportunity to take classes in a range of areas (AI, systems, databases, graphics, HCI, theory, etc)? How much depth will I be going into in the various topics?
It states on the site that it's for DX7 right now.
It's during on of the battle scenes on the Planet of Junk. They actually used the real version during that scene (lyrics and everything), while they used an instrumental version of it during another.
"It's almost like they're pointing a flashlight straight at us!"
"That's a star, sir"
Actually, they've recently released a new server line (E7000, I believe). It's the only 32-way Pentium-III Xeon server. Right now it runs MS Win2K Data Center and is being sold by Unisys, Dell, and (I think) Compaq.
The only logical course of action, from a company stand point, is to sue. Consider the situation -- a free, potentially better product is coming up. If you can smear its name before it becomes widespread, mass market adoption is a lot less likely. The important part is the lawsuit -- winning or losing, in this case, is not. Sure some people will take to it, but wide support probably won't be there.
What would really be interesting is some statistics on how far the people got (but, they won't tell us for security reasons). Several years ago the DoD conducted a research project where they had people try to break into their systems called Elligible Receiver. http://www.soci.niu.edu/~crypt/other/eligib.htm has some good information about it.
Check out http://www.seds.org/billa/tnp/mars.html& lt;/a> . No one is saying that there isn't water on Mars -- we know there is. This article is saying that the formations are not necessarily formed by liquid water. The northern polar cap has a layer of ice, the southern cap may have an ice layer, and there's a non-0 chance that there are aquifers under the surface.
Strength of software has *everything* to do with it. The reason Windows 3.1 beat OS/2 is *exactly* because of the software that ran on it. The same thing has happened over and over in the console world. Consider the Playstation vs the N64. N64 is tecnically superior, but it failed to get developer support and thus didn't have the number of big games that the PSX had.
Would definitely wake me up...
/me reaches over
*whap* *whap* *whap*
/me awakens quickly
IANAL, but I think the difference is that Napster is fully aware of the fact that people are illegally trading MP3s on their system. From what I've read, an ISP is responsible for its hosted content once it's been made aware of the problem.
Frankly, I'm not surprised giving where the information is coming from. One of the two writers works at an above-Top-Secret Institute for Defense Analyses super-computing facility. He probably spends most of his time researching number-crunching algorithms and the like.
One of the pages (or both, don't remember) mentions that somehow he's able to get the joint angles (or perhaps he does this via extrapolation given the length/orientation of the light saber). In any event, it's probably just straight-forward forward or inverse kinematics.