Re:how to determine the perfect game of chess
on
Solving Chess?
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· Score: 1
There are not (nor will there be) enough monkeys collectively in our solar system to complete a single Shakespearean work. It's a good thing we had Shakespeare to actually do it for us.
Of course, Shakespeare was a homo sapiens sapiens--a glorified bald monkey. So we know that the works of Shakespeare can be created by just one monkey in less than 52 years--if it's the right monkey.
Build a "fast" enough computer, run it for a few million, or billion, or octillion, or... years, and you'll get the answer. Unless of course the minimal power requirements of the minimal system to compute the answer turns out to be greater than the stored potential energy of the universe...
...or the Vogons come 'round and blow it up five minutes before it's done calculating...
Answer: Actual CDs/Tapes/Vinyl from the Companies will always have a serious advantage over Internet-related transmission methods: the Album Art/Liner Notes/etc. You can't very well download and print up your own sleeves for each Disc you get....
I disagree with the above on two counts: First, with an inkjet printer you very well could print up your own sleeves and liner notes. In fact, most pirate CDs for sale were created in just this way. Second, any advantage given by liner notes pales in comparison to the disadvantage of having to carry a stack of CDs around with you all the time. With.mp3s I can listen to my music from anywhere in the world (just a quick ftp to my home computer and voila!), rather than having to drive home and physically retrieve the music.
Au contraire! Do an "ls -l" in a terminal window and you'll see there is at least the beginning of multi-user support in BeOS. Hell, "su" even works. (Of course, since no privilege restrictions are enforced, it's not particularly useful... but it's the '100%' I disagree with)
I can see where he's coming from as far as people not wanting to read books online, I know working at a computer all day long gives me enough of a headache without reading "War and Peace" on a monitor, too.
This is certainly true today, but it's going to change in a few years, as people start buying Web Pads and the like. Eventually display technology will be good enough that reading a hand-held LCD screen won't be significantly different from reading a traditional book, and at that point I believe people will find themselves preferring these to dead-tree books, if only because they don't have to keep going out and buying new ones.
And any material put on the web will be usable now (on your computer) and then (on your e-book). Hell, you can even take your e-book to the library if you miss the social aspects...;^)
(When exactly did piracy) change from something people did furtively on IRC, to an absolute right of the people to have whatever they want, whenever they want? I guess when programs like Napster make it possible for any clueless newbie on cable or University ethernet to serve up mp3s to the masses, it becomes acceptable?
I'm afraid that's exactly right. If it becomes easy enough to break the law without getting caught, and no immediate harm is noted, then it becomes socially acceptable to do so.
Look at all the people driving 75 miles an hour on the freeway when the speed limited is 65.
Look at all the people surfing the Web on company time.
Watch the kids refilling their "water glasses" from the soda fountain at Taco Bell.
Whine all you want, but for little things like this, it's not a matter of right and wrong, it's a matter of can or can't.
WRONG I have a dual p2-450 with one gig of ram. The night after I received my 4 sticks of 256Mb ram (I was drooling), I fired up SoundForge and loaded a live phish dat onto my hard drive. I decided to run some audio applications to manipulate the sound, after about 10-15 minutes of hard-drive crunching, max cpu using, mouse locking up on screen, ect (you get my point), I got an out of memory error.
Such an exploit could be done... however it would rely on the Men In Black (tm) sneaking into your house some time beforehand and installing a "special" expansion board inside your machine. I'm thinking a simple PCI board with several pounds of plastique attached would do the trick... then later, when they know you're in front of the machine (i.e. they detect your computer retrieving HTML pages or something) they send your computer the detonate command... Still want to buy that Riva/TNT board?;^)
Re:Mach64, Via Rhine, bt829 ??
on
BeOS For Linux!
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· Score: 1
Maybe Be should let people vote on which drivers they want the most, or open-source the OS so they could port code from Linux
I should point out that it's perfectly possible to write BeOS drivers without the BeOS source code. Be's driver API is extremely simple and elegant, and fairly well documented, and Be has been bending over backwards to encourage independent driver development (they write articles on "how to make a device driver" in practically every Be newsletter--gets a bit tiresome, really;))
Now, getting specs from the video card manufacturer may be a different story altogether, but presumably if you have enough info to write a Linux driver you could do a BeOS driver as well.
I don't see what the point of all this "my OS is better than yours" talk is.
It's not like there is anything to prove here--Linux does some things well, and so does Be. Run Linux if you want; run Be if you want. Both can be obtained for free, so it's not like you have to make an either/or decision. Hell, install both and see which one suits you better!
You lot just aren't getting it. If you remove the code morphing layer, then you have to put backwards compatibility into the hardware down the road.
Not really. Transmeta could then just write a code-morphing layer to "morph" the ISA you coded to into the new one. No?
Re:Ya, but what do you *do* with it?
on
Free Be
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· Score: 1
What can you use this OS for? I mean there are no mainstream apps for this operating system. No Office, Netscape, Quicken, recent games, nada.
If your sole criteria for using an application is that it be "mainstream", then Windows 95 is probably the OS for you. If, on the other hand, you are actually trying to get something accomplished, you might try buying or downloading one or more of the following: Gobe Productive 2.0 (very nice productivity suite by the same people who made ClarisWorks for the Mac), Opera, Corum III, ArtPaint, Moho, BePlan, E-Picture, etc.
I need to get stuff done not spend hours learning new word processing, web browser, and financial packages.
You could just as easily argue it the other way: "I need to get stuff done, not spend hours working around Windows inefficiency and design flaws".
-Jeremy
ps If your post was a troll, then congratulations, you got me:)
The fact that M$ leaves the site open to attack by default is part of the whole stupity of the M$ model.
As much as I hate to say it, Microsoft is only giving the people what they want.
Imagine Scenario 1: Microsoft ships a truly secure product, where you have to set up permissions for everything on install. Result: Lots of reviews about how the product is "hard to set up and use", and lazy sysadmins/managers go to the competition. Microsoft loses.
Scenario 2 (what actually happened): Microsoft ships a product with useful defaults that are also big security holes. With the defaults, you don't have to know how to do much, you can just install and presto, your web site "works". True, if you read the documentation, it warns you about the security holes, but you and I both know that most people only read docs when something isn't working. Result: The reviews talk about how the Microsoft product is easy to configure and get working, and the public buys it. Maybe six months or a year later a story like this comes out, which is embarrassing, but by then it doesn't matter: Most sites are using M$ software aren't likely to switch now!
Scenario 3: Microsoft manages to figure out a way to have the defaults, and a way to make sure even Joe Clueless is forced to set them, so that his ignorance doesn't lead to an insecure site. I'm sure they have either done this or will soon...
We're not asking to own machine guns (which can be owned legally in the USA provided one undergoes a massive legal registration process); just legitimate means of self defense. Bows and arrows are all well and good, but modern hardware does not stand still.
Fair enough, but this is a case of the proverbial slippery slope. At what point is a weapon so powerful and destructive that it is no longer a legitimate means of self-defense? Arrows are okay; nukes are not okay; but where in between those do we draw the line?
The other main difference is that the L2 cache runs at the processor speed, whereas regular Pentium II's and III's L2 cache run at 1/2 speed.
This has me a little bit confused... if the L2 cache runs at processor speed, of what use is the L1 cache? I'm sure I'm missing something, can someone explain?
It's not saying that piracy will bring down the industry. It's saying the people who own the copyright on these movies won't use DVD if there isn't sufficient copy protection.
And now that it's been shown that the copy protection isn't sufficient, they intend to solve their problem by suing the people who demonstrated its insufficiency? Talk about shooting the messenger...
As a sidenote, does anyone know if someone's tried writing a client-side bot that uses just visual input? Would make a darn interesting alternative to handwriting and face recognition...
This is a very interesting idea... after all the complaining from "visual computing" people about how hard it is for a computer to interpret real-world visual input, perhaps it's time to start with systems whose "eyes" aren't video cameras but Quake3 rendering engines. Once we have systems that do a good job visually navigating Quake World, then we can try them out in the Real World...
How about this: At connect time, the server transmits the authentication code to the client as a Java.class file (or reasonable equivalent)? The authentication code is run (in a sandbox) and checks out the game environment to make sure it's "approved", before generating the correct response code that can then be sent back to the server to allow the game to start.
Of course this is still vulnerable to all the previously mentioned spoofing attacks, but the advantage here is that the server could use a different authentication method every day (or even generate a custom authenticator for each connection), which would hopefully make it a giant pain-in-the-ass to keep your cheat code "compatible" with the server...
The fax machine saves us hundreds of dollars a month in shipping expenses plus we do not have to scan in existing paper documents to send them to our clients
Hmmm... and just what do you suppose the fax machine does with the pages you insert into it?
Junk mail can be recycled, in general. This thing clearly could not be
Here's what they should do: design one of these with an embedded FM radio receiver in it, and send one unit to every person in the USA. From then on, all junk mail will be "beamed" into this paper display, rather than mailed to everybody's house.
Advantages:
- No more trees getting chopped down to make junk mail - Faster delivery - Easier to ignore and delete than paper mail
The landfills present a non-trivial pile of stuff, mixed in various types. It'd take years of concentrated efforts to properly clean them up.
I've always secretely hoped that one of the better products of nanotechnology will be a molecular-scale garbage dissassembler (like the "deke" in The Diamond Age) that can separate and sort landfill material back into its component elements. That would be very handy; I wonder if it's at all possible?
Innovation: reminds me that the iMac was voted most innovative product of 1999, when we had the same thing eons ago (CP/M or whatever the predecessor of the commodore VIC20 was called) Innovative, yeah right...
You are referring to the Commodore PET? Hmmm, come to think of it, there is some resemblance...
I wonder if anyone has tried putting their PC into a PET's casing, for that cool retro look?
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, Shakespeare was a homo sapiens sapiens--a glorified bald monkey. So we know that the works of Shakespeare can be created by just one monkey in less than 52 years--if it's the right monkey.
Yeah? And
Hell, they might as well go the whole nine yards and outlaw bits and bytes.
I disagree with the above on two counts: First, with an inkjet printer you very well could print up your own sleeves and liner notes. In fact, most pirate CDs for sale were created in just this way. Second, any advantage given by liner notes pales in comparison to the disadvantage of having to carry a stack of CDs around with you all the time. With .mp3s I can listen to my music from anywhere in the world (just a quick ftp to my home computer and voila!), rather than having to drive home and physically retrieve the music.
Jeremy
The BeOS is 100% a single user OS.
Au contraire! Do an "ls -l" in a terminal window and you'll see there is at least the beginning of multi-user support in BeOS. Hell, "su" even works. (Of course, since no privilege restrictions are enforced, it's not particularly useful... but it's the '100%' I disagree with)
wanting to read books online, I know working at a computer all day long gives me enough of a headache without reading "War and Peace" on a monitor, too.
This is certainly true today, but it's going to change in a few years, as people start buying Web Pads and the like. Eventually display technology will be good enough that reading a hand-held LCD screen won't be significantly different from reading a traditional book, and at that point I believe people will find themselves preferring these to dead-tree books, if only because they don't have to keep going out and buying new ones.
And any material put on the web will be usable now (on your computer) and then (on your e-book). Hell, you can even take your e-book to the library if you miss the social aspects...
I'm afraid that's exactly right. If it becomes easy enough to break the law without getting caught, and no immediate harm is noted, then it becomes socially acceptable to do so.
Look at all the people driving 75 miles an hour on the freeway when the speed limited is 65.
Look at all the people surfing the Web on company time.
Watch the kids refilling their "water glasses" from the soda fountain at Taco Bell.
Whine all you want, but for little things like this, it's not a matter of right and wrong, it's a matter of can or can't.
This sounds like a job for (Swhoooosh!)
BeOS man!
Such an exploit could be done... however it would rely on the Men In Black (tm) sneaking into your house some time beforehand and installing a "special" expansion board inside your machine. I'm thinking a simple PCI board with several pounds of plastique attached would do the trick... then later, when they know you're in front of the machine (i.e. they detect your computer retrieving HTML pages or something) they send your computer the detonate command... Still want to buy that Riva/TNT board? ;^)
I should point out that it's perfectly possible to write BeOS drivers without the BeOS source code. Be's driver API is extremely simple and elegant, and fairly well documented, and Be has been bending over backwards to encourage independent driver development (they write articles on "how to make a device driver" in practically every Be newsletter--gets a bit tiresome, really
Now, getting specs from the video card manufacturer may be a different story altogether, but presumably if you have enough info to write a Linux driver you could do a BeOS driver as well.
It's not like there is anything to prove here--Linux does some things well, and so does Be. Run Linux if you want; run Be if you want. Both can be obtained for free, so it's not like you have to make an either/or decision. Hell, install both and see which one suits you better!
And be happy that you have so many choices!
You lot just aren't getting it. If you remove the code morphing layer, then you have to put backwards compatibility into the hardware down the road.
Not really. Transmeta could then just write a code-morphing layer to "morph" the ISA you coded to into the new one. No?
What can you use this OS for? I mean there are no mainstream apps for this operating system. No Office, Netscape, Quicken, recent games, nada.
:)
If your sole criteria for using an application is that it be "mainstream", then Windows 95 is probably the OS for you. If, on the other hand, you are actually trying to get something accomplished, you might try buying or downloading one or more of the following: Gobe Productive 2.0 (very nice productivity suite by the same people who made ClarisWorks for the Mac), Opera, Corum III, ArtPaint, Moho, BePlan, E-Picture, etc.
I need to get stuff done not spend hours learning new word processing, web browser, and financial packages.
You could just as easily argue it the other way: "I need to get stuff done, not spend hours working around Windows inefficiency and design flaws".
-Jeremy
ps If your post was a troll, then congratulations, you got me
The fact that M$ leaves the site open to attack by default is part of the whole stupity of the M$ model.
As much as I hate to say it, Microsoft is only giving the people what they want.
Imagine Scenario 1: Microsoft ships a truly secure product, where you have to set up permissions for everything on install. Result: Lots of reviews about how the product is "hard to set up and use", and lazy sysadmins/managers go to the competition. Microsoft loses.
Scenario 2 (what actually happened): Microsoft ships a product with useful defaults that are also big security holes. With the defaults, you don't have to know how to do much, you can just install and presto, your web site "works". True, if you read the documentation, it warns you about the security holes, but you and I both know that most people only read docs when something isn't working. Result: The reviews talk about how the Microsoft product is easy to configure and get working, and the public buys it. Maybe six months or a year later a story like this comes out, which is embarrassing, but by then it doesn't matter: Most sites are using M$ software aren't likely to switch now!
Scenario 3: Microsoft manages to figure out a way to have the defaults, and a way to make sure even Joe Clueless is forced to set them, so that his ignorance doesn't lead to an insecure site. I'm sure they have either done this or will soon...
I have no real comments to make about PvP or UserFriendly; I just obligated to point out that Goats is a hell of a funny strip.
We're not asking to own machine guns (which can be owned legally in the USA provided one undergoes a massive legal registration process); just legitimate means of self defense. Bows and arrows are all well and good, but modern hardware does not stand still.
Fair enough, but this is a case of the proverbial slippery slope. At what point is a weapon so powerful and destructive that it is no longer a legitimate means of self-defense? Arrows are okay; nukes are not okay; but where in between those do we draw the line?
The other main difference is that the L2 cache runs at the processor speed, whereas regular Pentium II's and III's L2 cache run at 1/2 speed.
This has me a little bit confused... if the L2 cache runs at processor speed, of what use is the L1 cache? I'm sure I'm missing something, can someone explain?
-Jeremy
It's not saying that piracy will bring down the industry. It's saying the people who own the
copyright on these movies won't use DVD if there isn't sufficient copy protection.
And now that it's been shown that the copy protection isn't sufficient, they intend to solve their problem by suing the people who demonstrated its insufficiency? Talk about shooting the messenger...
As a sidenote, does anyone know if someone's tried writing a client-side bot that uses just visual input? Would make a darn interesting alternative to handwriting and face recognition...
This is a very interesting idea... after all the complaining from "visual computing" people about how hard it is for a computer to interpret real-world visual input, perhaps it's time to start with systems whose "eyes" aren't video cameras but Quake3 rendering engines. Once we have systems that do a good job visually navigating Quake World, then we can try them out in the Real World...
How about this: At connect time, the server transmits the authentication code to the client as a Java .class file (or reasonable equivalent)? The authentication code is run (in a sandbox) and checks out the game environment to make sure it's "approved", before generating the correct response code that can then be sent back to the server to allow the game to start.
Of course this is still vulnerable to all the previously mentioned spoofing attacks, but the advantage here is that the server could use a different authentication method every day (or even generate a custom authenticator for each connection), which would hopefully make it a giant pain-in-the-ass to keep your cheat code "compatible" with the server...
Their intent is not to hurt people/development/whatever, it's just to make a quick buck.
That phrase could be used to describe most drug dealers, burglars, con artists, and muggers. Having money as your motivation doesn't justify anything.
The fax machine saves us hundreds of dollars a month in shipping expenses plus we do not have to scan in existing paper documents to send them to our clients
Hmmm... and just what do you suppose the fax machine does with the pages you insert into it?
Junk mail can be recycled, in general. This thing clearly could not be
Here's what they should do: design one of these with an embedded FM radio receiver in it, and send one unit to every person in the USA. From then on, all junk mail will be "beamed" into this paper display, rather than mailed to everybody's house.
Advantages:
- No more trees getting chopped down to make junk mail
- Faster delivery
- Easier to ignore and delete than paper mail
The landfills present a non-trivial pile of stuff, mixed in various types. It'd take years of
concentrated efforts to properly clean them up.
I've always secretely hoped that one of the better products of nanotechnology will be a molecular-scale garbage dissassembler (like the "deke" in The Diamond Age) that can separate and sort landfill material back into its component elements. That would be very handy; I wonder if it's at all possible?
Innovation: reminds me that the iMac was voted most innovative product of 1999, when we had the same thing eons ago (CP/M or whatever the predecessor of the commodore VIC20 was called) Innovative, yeah right...
You are referring to the Commodore PET? Hmmm, come to think of it, there is some resemblance...
I wonder if anyone has tried putting their PC into a PET's casing, for that cool retro look?