I can't pay you with a credit card, but would you be interested in a share of $20 million dollars from my friend, the deposed Nigerian dictator? All you have to do is give me your bank account number and PIN, I'll handle the rest. How does $1 million US sound?
I cannot believe nobody has mentioned this, so here goes.
Nethack is based on a system in which you can think about your actions for as long as you want. In fact, one fairly common variety of posts to alt.games.rougelike.nethack is "here's a screenshot, what do I do now?" If it were to go away from a tile and turn-based game, you would lose a good portion of the ability to formulate a strategy. Incidentally, try Fallout for a really good turn and tile-based combat system. If you haven't, go get it and Fallout 2 in the bargain bin (I've seen the two packaged together in the discount rack for about $10 US).
Real-time and turn-based combat are both good when implemented correctly, but Nethack has had years of work go into creating a truly excellent turn and tile based combat system.
Ooooh, benchmarks. Any company can pick and choose good benchmarks for their chip; you aren't even giving numbers. I want to see some real-world numbers, preferably ones that relate to the Itanium2's ability to handle non-preprocessed code (as other posters have mentioned, trying to work with anything dynamic throws all of Itanium's fancy explicit parallelization out the window) Put up or shut up.
So will we finally be able to embed (part of) our favourite OS into the PC hardware?
Of course we'll be able to have hardware Windows XP! And better yet, all those Linux-supporting commie bastards are gonna have a lot harder time booting their favorite OS.
Endusers tend to be on a stub network with only one connection to the Net as a whole. If there were one or two core routers that censored certain blocks, then it would be a trivial problem to route around them, but since people are being blocked at their only point of access to the Net, they must take the issue to a higher level; that is, change ISPs. Using an outside proxy is also an option. However, these all require some action on the part of the user. There is no way for the network to route around a single point of failure.
So NVidia has released Linux drivers for their proprietary Xbox-only chip? It would take some serious reverse engineering to get 1/10th of the capabilities of that chip working, I'm sure. We don't have access to any really detailed specs or even drivers for another platform. By the time the chip was sucessfully hacked, Microsoft would probably have already introduced the Xbox-II.
The way Trolltech's dual licensing system works is as follows:
Choose to make your program GPL under Linux, and you license QT for free.
Or
Choose to make your program any other license, on any platform. Pay Trolltech the full license fee for QT.
Basically, this means that you can't use a QT-based GPL program in your closed-source program, unless the program's authors agree. What is does mean is that you can use QT for free if you develop Free software, or you can pay for QT if you develop non-Free software.
I'm sure the Chinese spammers will respond quickly to demands from the US legal system for money. I believe that the majority of spam originates overseas now (I don't remember where I read that, but it's certainly true for my inbox). Also, spam has long been the domain of out-and-out criminals.
Deposed Nigerian dictators and herbal-Viagra peddlers are already commiting fairly major crimes, and the threat of an extra $10 per email for the tiny fraction of people who will collect antispam fines is far outweighed by the threat of a 10 to 25 year in federal pound-me-in-the-ass prision. All fines would do would be to make spam the exclusive domain of criminals and overseas operations, which it largely is already.
You treat this as if it were hard. A smartcard or USB/CompactFlash/SmartMedia device could hold a ludicrously large key. Even a tiny 4K-16K smartcard could hold keys practically unbreakable with any technology short of quantum computing.
While I haven't done anything like this personally, I would imagine it would be fairly simple to set up a Linux box with the bare essentials to boot itself and access the EFS key, then run everything off the EFS itself.
NO, NO, NO. Microsoft would be in deep trouble if they were to include GPL code in a product, then try to sell it without sources easily availabe, or if they tried to restrict the user's right to resale (the user can copy and sell the software). The point of the GPL is to say that users get source and can modify and redistribute a program (as long as they also include sources).
Incidentally, you may wish to check out the FSF's GPL FAQ. It helps to clear up these misconceptions.
I'm a firm believer in the Darwinian process and sometimes a little extinction is a good thing. Just because we can do something, doesn't mean we should.
Except for the inconvenient little fact that it was humans who wiped out the wooly mammoth. If we hadn't hunted the things into extinction, they would probably survive quite well in areas like Siberia. Whether we should "play God" here is another ethical dilemma entirely, but I don't think Darwin would have any troubles with humans bringing back a species of animal that humans killed off.
What about those students who have to work decent jobs to pay for their tuition, food, shelter, and books? It is damn near impossible to work part-time and earn any disposable income, and working full-time while going to school is roughly equivalent to asking your professors to just fail you for the quarter/semester.
Experimental private aircraft are perfectly legal to fly (at least in the US); they just don't go through all the really heavy test-to-destruction stuff that the FAA requires for some components. Of course, they still need to be approved as airworthy, follow maintinance schedules, and have a big "EXPERIMENTAL" sticker posted on the side, but if you could prove it's airworthy, you could fly it to your heart's content.
<DISCLAIMER TYPE="LONGWINDED,DUMB"> Note that I am not an FAA representative; if you want to license your airplane, talk to someone who is. I take no responsibility for anyone trying to replicate the Spruce Goose in their spare time, then flying it, crashing, and saying "It's OK, I read it on Slashdot"! Don't be a moron. Please. </DISCLAIMER>
Actually, Snopes calls you on the American space-pen/Russian space-pencil legend. Apparently, both the US and USSR used pencils until it was realized that floating bits of graphite (dust and broken lead) weren't the best things to have around electrical equipment, and that wood wasn't that great an idea in a pure-oxygen capsule environment
Urban legends aside, it seems to me that a robot with two wheels would be able to move around in much smaller spaces than one with four, and that the ability to pivot on the spot might help in cramped maintinence areas where humans don't want to or can't go. After all, isn't the idea of robotics to replace humans in dirty or dangerous jobs?
Einstein's general relativity actually predicts the existence of gravity waves and gravitons (really the same thing, viewed two different ways). Trying to find gravity waves is one of the biggest scientific challenges of our time.
It's accomplished via huge (4 ft. diameter, 2.5 mi. length) tubes in an L-shape. A laser is then bounced along the length of the tube, and measures its distance very accurately: to within 10^-16 (!) cm, or about one hundred millionth the diameter of a hydrogen atom. Any change in the distance is a possible indication of a gravity wave passing through from some distant, powerful source. The fact that gravity decreases exponentially with distance means that even gravitational waves from extremely powerful sources, like binary neutron-star systems, are very weak when they get to Earth.
Of course, other vibrations can screw this up, so these observatories are really isolated (both geographically and mechanically) and data is compared from around the world. Lots of information is available at the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) website, where I got most of the specs listed here.
The problem with something like ThoughtTreasure is that it will have trouble determining how to parse information that a human could understand naturally. To use the Pulp Fiction example, the review might say that it was a Quentin Tarantino movie, and assign him to the "director" role. But what happens when the same parser is run on a review of Minority Report, which states that it's a Tom Cruise movie? Does it assign Tom Cruise to the "starring actor" role?
Systems like this tend to have a way of pointing out just how many differing ways we humans have of expressing concepts which are similar, and how many similar ways we express completely different concepts. We can never really rely on a machine to make human-like categorizations until it has a near-human level of intelligence. While we may be able to use software to extract some metadata, a relational filesystem really can't be a reality unless we ask users to submit massive amouts of metadata themselves.
Selective Service is a draft database. If the draft is reinstated, the Selective Service DB will be used to get the names and personal info of all men in the US within the age bracket for the draft (or at least those who have sent in the card). However, no people in the US today are going into the military except via a recruiting office.
Nope. Magnum Research makes a Desert Eagle.357 Magnum. You may have seen a similar gun chambered for.50 Mag in the Matrix (the agents used them, and fired them one-handed, which will break your arm if you tried it).
That's not just Israel. Even the "big" pages seem to use talking popups, "interstitials" (those Flash monstrosoties that cover part of the screen) or ads designed to look like Windows UI components and warning messages.
People say that Web advertising doesn't work, but I will click on a banner ad that displays something relevant to me. However, I absolutely refuse to patronize a site that uses popups or any of the above mentioned ad techniques. I don't care that Orbitz will save me several hundred bucks, I use a travel agent (who gets me decent deals anyway). I don't care that I can get nifty-looking spy^H^H^H home-monitoring equipment from X10.com; stuff that I might even buy under other circumstances (tiny cameras are neat!). Don't even get me started on the ones that try to defraud me by displaying Windows error messages (in Linux, no less!). These companies will never see a cent from me. Too bad, because they might have something to offer.
Try something like Scorched Earth 2000. It's a Java based cross-platform network-multiplayer version of the classic tanks-lob-shells game. Even better, it's GPL (no worries about legal stuff!).
Tank games require a combination of skill and luck that tends to reward skilled play, while still remaining accesible to newbies if that's a concern. Someone can learn to play decently in 5 minutes, rather than the 40-50 frustrating hours it takes to become decent at Quake/UT/Counterstrike/FPS-of-the-month.
Note that there's an ad banner, but that's just HTML, so it can be removed without any real hassle.
What if you just want to understand what your computer does "underneath the hood"? Slashdot has quite a few people reading it who feel this way; they tend to call themselves "geeks". While this might not be that useful to programmers in the course of their jobs, it might be useful to Slashdot's and Ars' audience: people who want to understand.
I've found that B&W lasers provide almost all I need. There are really very few times when I need to print any color pictures from home; if I do, I keep a fairly cheap old Lexmark inkjet around. My HP Laserjet IIP has great Linux compatability, prints fairly quickly (faster than almost any inkjet, although nowhere near as fast as a modern laser) and the toner lasts forever and a day. I think I've put about 4 reams through that thing on the current toner cartridge, and it is still chugging along without any lightening problems.
The only downside is that new toner from HP costs about $100 a pop (although refilling is only ~$35, I switch off refilling and new cartridges, to prevent too much accumulated gunk). Still, though, it is an average of $135 every two years, giving you a cost-per-month of about $5. I would strongly suggest checking out Ebay (try to find someone near you where you can drive over and pick it up, as shipping's painful on big, heavy laser units).
I don't see how that would affect anything. Since you check against a.length (rather than a constant), once i hit a.length, you would end the loop. While you might hit a bug with the loop terminating early, it would never terminate late (and thus overflow).
The reason QT has its own string class is for cross-platform compatability. Standard strings on different platforms may behave oddly, while a QT-standard string object helps to achive the whole "write once, compile anywhere" goal.
Speaking of reinventing the wheel, how about GTK implementing its own OO environment on top of C? Last time I checked, there was a very good one called "C++". </FANBOY>
Slashdot Mirror
I can't pay you with a credit card, but would you be interested in a share of $20 million dollars from my friend, the deposed Nigerian dictator? All you have to do is give me your bank account number and PIN, I'll handle the rest. How does $1 million US sound?
Nethack is based on a system in which you can think about your actions for as long as you want. In fact, one fairly common variety of posts to alt.games.rougelike.nethack is "here's a screenshot, what do I do now?" If it were to go away from a tile and turn-based game, you would lose a good portion of the ability to formulate a strategy. Incidentally, try Fallout for a really good turn and tile-based combat system. If you haven't, go get it and Fallout 2 in the bargain bin (I've seen the two packaged together in the discount rack for about $10 US).
Real-time and turn-based combat are both good when implemented correctly, but Nethack has had years of work go into creating a truly excellent turn and tile based combat system.
Ooooh, benchmarks. Any company can pick and choose good benchmarks for their chip; you aren't even giving numbers. I want to see some real-world numbers, preferably ones that relate to the Itanium2's ability to handle non-preprocessed code (as other posters have mentioned, trying to work with anything dynamic throws all of Itanium's fancy explicit parallelization out the window) Put up or shut up.
Endusers tend to be on a stub network with only one connection to the Net as a whole. If there were one or two core routers that censored certain blocks, then it would be a trivial problem to route around them, but since people are being blocked at their only point of access to the Net, they must take the issue to a higher level; that is, change ISPs. Using an outside proxy is also an option. However, these all require some action on the part of the user. There is no way for the network to route around a single point of failure.
So NVidia has released Linux drivers for their proprietary Xbox-only chip? It would take some serious reverse engineering to get 1/10th of the capabilities of that chip working, I'm sure. We don't have access to any really detailed specs or even drivers for another platform. By the time the chip was sucessfully hacked, Microsoft would probably have already introduced the Xbox-II.
- Choose to make your program GPL under Linux, and you license QT for free.
Or- Choose to make your program any other license, on any platform. Pay Trolltech the full license fee for QT.
Basically, this means that you can't use a QT-based GPL program in your closed-source program, unless the program's authors agree. What is does mean is that you can use QT for free if you develop Free software, or you can pay for QT if you develop non-Free software.Deposed Nigerian dictators and herbal-Viagra peddlers are already commiting fairly major crimes, and the threat of an extra $10 per email for the tiny fraction of people who will collect antispam fines is far outweighed by the threat of a 10 to 25 year in federal pound-me-in-the-ass prision. All fines would do would be to make spam the exclusive domain of criminals and overseas operations, which it largely is already.
While I haven't done anything like this personally, I would imagine it would be fairly simple to set up a Linux box with the bare essentials to boot itself and access the EFS key, then run everything off the EFS itself.
Incidentally, you may wish to check out the FSF's GPL FAQ. It helps to clear up these misconceptions.
What about those students who have to work decent jobs to pay for their tuition, food, shelter, and books? It is damn near impossible to work part-time and earn any disposable income, and working full-time while going to school is roughly equivalent to asking your professors to just fail you for the quarter/semester.
<DISCLAIMER TYPE="LONGWINDED,DUMB">
Note that I am not an FAA representative; if you want to license your airplane, talk to someone who is. I take no responsibility for anyone trying to replicate the Spruce Goose in their spare time, then flying it, crashing, and saying "It's OK, I read it on Slashdot"! Don't be a moron. Please.
</DISCLAIMER>
Urban legends aside, it seems to me that a robot with two wheels would be able to move around in much smaller spaces than one with four, and that the ability to pivot on the spot might help in cramped maintinence areas where humans don't want to or can't go. After all, isn't the idea of robotics to replace humans in dirty or dangerous jobs?
It's accomplished via huge (4 ft. diameter, 2.5 mi. length) tubes in an L-shape. A laser is then bounced along the length of the tube, and measures its distance very accurately: to within 10^-16 (!) cm, or about one hundred millionth the diameter of a hydrogen atom. Any change in the distance is a possible indication of a gravity wave passing through from some distant, powerful source. The fact that gravity decreases exponentially with distance means that even gravitational waves from extremely powerful sources, like binary neutron-star systems, are very weak when they get to Earth.
Of course, other vibrations can screw this up, so these observatories are really isolated (both geographically and mechanically) and data is compared from around the world. Lots of information is available at the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) website, where I got most of the specs listed here.
Also kazaalite.com. Those 3d packages don't come cheap ;-).
Systems like this tend to have a way of pointing out just how many differing ways we humans have of expressing concepts which are similar, and how many similar ways we express completely different concepts. We can never really rely on a machine to make human-like categorizations until it has a near-human level of intelligence. While we may be able to use software to extract some metadata, a relational filesystem really can't be a reality unless we ask users to submit massive amouts of metadata themselves.
Selective Service is a draft database. If the draft is reinstated, the Selective Service DB will be used to get the names and personal info of all men in the US within the age bracket for the draft (or at least those who have sent in the card). However, no people in the US today are going into the military except via a recruiting office.
Nope. Magnum Research makes a Desert Eagle .357 Magnum. You may have seen a similar gun chambered for .50 Mag in the Matrix (the agents used them, and fired them one-handed, which will break your arm if you tried it).
People say that Web advertising doesn't work, but I will click on a banner ad that displays something relevant to me. However, I absolutely refuse to patronize a site that uses popups or any of the above mentioned ad techniques. I don't care that Orbitz will save me several hundred bucks, I use a travel agent (who gets me decent deals anyway). I don't care that I can get nifty-looking spy^H^H^H home-monitoring equipment from X10.com; stuff that I might even buy under other circumstances (tiny cameras are neat!). Don't even get me started on the ones that try to defraud me by displaying Windows error messages (in Linux, no less!). These companies will never see a cent from me. Too bad, because they might have something to offer.
Tank games require a combination of skill and luck that tends to reward skilled play, while still remaining accesible to newbies if that's a concern. Someone can learn to play decently in 5 minutes, rather than the 40-50 frustrating hours it takes to become decent at Quake/UT/Counterstrike/FPS-of-the-month.
Note that there's an ad banner, but that's just HTML, so it can be removed without any real hassle.
What if you just want to understand what your computer does "underneath the hood"? Slashdot has quite a few people reading it who feel this way; they tend to call themselves "geeks". While this might not be that useful to programmers in the course of their jobs, it might be useful to Slashdot's and Ars' audience: people who want to understand.
The only downside is that new toner from HP costs about $100 a pop (although refilling is only ~$35, I switch off refilling and new cartridges, to prevent too much accumulated gunk). Still, though, it is an average of $135 every two years, giving you a cost-per-month of about $5. I would strongly suggest checking out Ebay (try to find someone near you where you can drive over and pick it up, as shipping's painful on big, heavy laser units).
I don't see how that would affect anything. Since you check against a.length (rather than a constant), once i hit a.length, you would end the loop. While you might hit a bug with the loop terminating early, it would never terminate late (and thus overflow).
The reason QT has its own string class is for cross-platform compatability. Standard strings on different platforms may behave oddly, while a QT-standard string object helps to achive the whole "write once, compile anywhere" goal.
Speaking of reinventing the wheel, how about GTK implementing its own OO environment on top of C? Last time I checked, there was a very good one called "C++".
</FANBOY>