What they mean is if you are one of these obsessed gamers with no other life who has to have the greatest fucking video card on some overclocked "riced out" box (preferably with a lucite window and lots of neon), then this is what you will need. And don't forget the flat-screen monitor.
As others have pointed out, the latest and greatest is already far past the recommended specs, to say nothing of these minimums.
I think it's also worth pointing out that it's difficult to even find a PC from a major manufacturer that doesn't meet these specs. In fact, I think it'd be difficult to find one even going back about 6 months. So, I'd say you're exaggerating a little, to say the least.
And as far as a flat screen monitor goes, those are actually generally considered not so great for gaming, except for a very few, very new ones, and those are just acceptable. The hardcore players still use CRTs unless they're lugging their computers to a LAN party.
I mean come on. we've heard this line befor: "sure it'll run on an X, but you wont get the FULL experience". Yadda, yadda, yadda.
To be sure, back in the day, there wasn't much difference between high and low quality. Heck, back in the Wolfenstein 3D era, about all you could change was the screensize. These days, though, the difference between everything turned on and the bare minimum is pretty substantial. Check out a modern game like FarCry for an example.
And of course the fact that certain brand names are being thrown around means nothing, right?
Actually, given that ATi and nVidia are the only two major players left in the 3d gaming market, the fact that their names are being tossed around does indeed mean nothing.
Oh, and shame on the US for not approving hydergine for use. It's one of the safest drugs there is, and useful to most anyone. Unfortunately, like many good drugs, the patents are owned by non-US companies, so no US company stands to profit, and so the FDA doesn't approve it. If it were the case that nootropics weren't useful, then Nobel laureate Eric Kandel wouldn't have announced devoting the remainder of his career to creating them.
I don't know if you're misinformed or just didn't check your sources (I would certainly hesitate to claim that you're lying outright), but hydergine is most defninitely approved for use in the US. Furthermore, while the company that makes it (Novartis) is primarily a Swiss company born out of the merger of Ciba and Sandoz (the company Hoffman was working for), I imagine any patents they had on the stuff have long since run out as it was discovered in the late 1940s.
because, at some point, somebody is going to make a 1st-person-shooter with absolutely realistic looking victims.
How long until it goes from subdermal photon scattering to absolutely realistic effects (of gibs flying off a body in the process of becoming a corpse.) We'll be able to make shots from a bullet's point of view as it pierces and rends. Will this enure us to the real thing?
No, I don't think it will. First off, even if the picture is perfect, it's still a picture in a monitor. There's still a disconnect there. Furthermore, the sound isn't perfect, and the tactile feel of, for instance, the gun firing wouldn't be there. Likewise the smells.
Having played a fair number of first person shooters, done a fair bit of target shooting, and a small amount of hunting, I can say that, for me at least, no game (barring one with some kind of neural interface) will ever have the level of immersion necessary to really desensitize me to violence, particularly any violence that I might commit myself.
That's been available since at least Win2K - select a folder, right click, Properties, Advanced, "Encrypt contents to secure data", answer the questions. Select the correct options, and all files moved to/created in that directory will be automatically encrypted. Perhaps that's not simple enough for them, but it's there, and it works.
Actually, checking on my Win2K laptop, that's not available, and I'm running the latest service pack and updates. I suspect from other posts that it may be available with XP. Perhaps the Wired offices haven't upgraded yet?:)
As the article and summary both mention, the release comes a week before the Premiere's visit to the US. An article in Der Spiegel claims, however, that the release was primarily motivated by the visit of German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.
An AP version of the story mentions Schroeders visit (which the Reuters story linked to by the summary does not), but does not go as far as claiming as Der Spiegel does that "[the release] is a gift for Schroeder" (my translation). That particular quote is attributed to Frank Lu of the Information Center for Democracy and Human Rights, a Hong Kong-based watchdog group that is a primary source for both the AP and Spiegel articles.
I suspect this is going to lead (post-2005) to a grey market in tuners and sets that are either actually old enough to be grandfathered in or are alleged to be old enough by the people selling them.
On top of that, of course, there'll be an outright black market in DRM-less tuners just like there's a black market in cable/satellite descramblers now.
All that said, I wonder if prices on devices like the mentioned DTV->MPEG2 converter are about to shoot up?
(As a sidenote, I really love how the various lobbyists and politicians are going on and on about how all of this is for the consumer's protection. Protection from what, exactly? Accidentally taping over home movies with the latest episode of the Sopranos?! But then, if our job is to consume, then recording a show is slacking off on the job.)
Someone correct me if I am wrong, but those Gideons Bibles found in motels are supposed to stay in the motels, right?
Checking www.gideons.org and the everything2.com entry for "Gideons Bible" shows that, actually, the Gideons fully intend for the Bibles to be taken by people who are interested in doing so. They gladly replace them for free.
Please comment on this idea.
It is legal for me to listen to a CD and then sell it to a friend, buy it back, etc, over and over. Let's say that we form a Co-op with 100 members. Each member kicks in $100, giving us a budget of $10,000 with which to purchase CDs. $10 from each member is reserved. The CDs are ripped and encoded. Let's say I want to listen to a CD. My $10 on reserve buys that CD from the Co-op. While I own the CD, I get to listen to the encoded music (I do not take physical possession). During that time, no other Co-op member may listen to the CD (unless there are additional copies available for purchase due to popularity). Essentially, a locking protocol would maintain a 1:1 relationship between the listener and physical media. Once I am done listening, I sell the CD back to the Co-op and my $10 is freed for the next selection. Is this legal? Has it been tried? Thanks!
That was essentially the idea behind the my.mp3.com service (you put a CD in your drive, mp3.com software figures out what CD it is, you can download mp3s of that CD from any computer once you login, occasionally you have to furnish the CD again). My mp3.com didn't last long. The RIAA put a stop to it almost immediately.
An identical idea was/is being tried with ROMs: essentially an online video game rental service. Last I heard Nintendo and their ilk were trying their damndest to shut it down.
Of course, it seems obvious to us that such an idea is clearly within the bounds of technology, the law, and reason. The way Nintendo and the RIAA see it, however, is that they can simply get more money by making everyone buy their own copies of games and music, so that's what they're pushing for, technology, the law, and reason be damned.
"First, the whole "my religion doesn't allow me to look at porn" argument is just nuts. If you truly believe this, you won't need your big brother (or whomever) to watch you." Ahh, while it's technically true that one wouldn't 'need' ones big brother watching over one, it certainly can't help. And of course the method would be useful for nonreligious people who want to curb their porn viewing (or addiction) for other reasons.
"Second, what about self control? Okay, you don't want to look at porn. So the only way you can stop is to have your PC report which sites you visit to Grandma?" Is this the "only way you can stop?" No, but accountability-based methods are some of the best ways to stop addictive behaviors. Alcoholics anonymous and other groups modelled after it make use of group meetings for a reason. And generally, one would confide in someone that one sees on a regular basis, which probably isn't Grandma.
"Finally, if you want to look at porn, look at porn. If your religion forbids it, well, that sucks... but otherwise, who the hell cares if you look at porn? I enjoy it, am not ashamed of it, and I certainly don't need anyone else (or any religion) scrutinizing what sites I visit." People who do not follow a religion or whose religion does not specifically forbid the viewing of porn may still wish to curb their habit for several reasons: 1) their spouse dislikes porn 2) they have children in the house and don't want to be viewing something that their children can't (by law) 3) they are not of age and their parents want to use an accountability-based method to make sure that their child isn't breaking the law 4) they don't want to feel addicted to something 5) they decide that porn degrades women, sex, etc
"So next we'll be CCing our Visa bill to someone, to curb excessive spending; faxing the grocery list/receipt to help with over-eating; and so on. Do these people actually need a babysitter? If so, what are they doing living on their own, let alone surfing the 'Net without supervision?" Managing money effectively is largely a taught or learned skill, not an inborn ability. People who did not have the benefit of being taught that particular skill by their parents, peers, or educators (as a great deal of people in the western world have not been, given the high rates of personal debt in those parts) may well need assistance later in life to help deal with bad spending habits. Similarly, people who overeat for whatever reason (low self-esteem, actual glandular problems, laziness, etc) may well desire some help in improving themselves. Which I think is the strangest part of your little diatribe: what is so wrong with a person wanting to fix something they see wrong with himself or herself and then having the courage to admit that they cannot do it on their own or at least could use a little help?
I for one applaud that courage, even if I or others may have different moral opinions regarding that same behavior in ourselves.
Consider two cooks/chefs, both having practiced their art for 30 or 40 years. Both receive rave reviews from those they serve and both have a wide repertoire to choose from. One is a 50 year-old grandmother and the other is chef at a 5-star restaurant. Do you think there is a difference between the cooking of a 'classically trained' chef and an ordinary person who has simply cooked for long enough to 'know their way around the kitchen?'
I consider in particular that a lot of chef schools and restaurants emphasize learning certain basic skills such as chopping onions and making sauces (or at least they use the student chefs as cheap labor to accomplish those uninteresting but important kitchen tasks), whereas a person teaching a child or grandchild to cook might just dive in to a complete meal. So, do you think cooking philosophies matter, or even exist as a useful way to differentiate chefs and/or cuisine?
Should the paper come over the top of the roll, or out from under the bottom?
There was a slashdot poll about this a long, long time ago (about the time I started reading slashdot, in fact...heh, even then there were people whining about how "slashdot had changed" and "we never have cool polls anymore...like that one about the toilet paper").
Ahh, here it is. The winner with 60% of 13401 votes is "Over". Under got 12%, 18% didn't care, and 8% answered "Huh?" I guess the "Huh?" group lives/lived in societies that don't use toilet paper (either because they use bidets or just go without...)
It's even worse than your analogy. Not only are you prohibited from test driving your music before buying, you can't even get the tiniest hint of what it really sounds like. What if you went to a car dealer, and you couldn't even see a single car? Because they were all in car-sized plastic jewel cases, and until you forked out your $20,000-plus, you could only read the liner notes and look at the car company's promotional pictures?
Actually, Barnes and Noble (at least the one in Little Rock, Arkansas of all places) now has a setup in their music section where every single CD in the store can be taken to any one of a dozen listening stations and every single track can be listened to for free, for as long as you want. Just walk up, scan the barcode, and up pops the CD info and track listing on an LCD screen. Select what you like and there you go. Thanks to that feature I've purchased three albums (all by Kodo, an excellent Japanese taiko drumming ensemble) that I otherwise would've been wary of purchasing (since they get, in my area, no radio play except a story on NPR that featured a little of their music).
So, there's a legitimate answer to one of the big 'excuses' for P2P (that there's no legal way to sample music). CD quality, instant access to a large and varied collection of music. Hard to get much better than that, except for having to go to the store. But is that so bad? After all, that gives you the ability to buy the CD right then and there...or would you rather just keep the mp3s after you find something you like and forget about buying the album?;)
This question comes up quite a bit. The answer hasn't changed in years because of the way the question is usually posed. You asked, essentially, if it is possible to solve chess by searching the entire move tree. Then you asked if it could be done with an infinite amount of processing power and memory. Well, of course it can be done with an infinite amount of each. The trick, as you then go on to ask about, is to do it in a finite amount of both.
Well, first of, the search space for chess is on the order of 10^43. Now, that's a lot. So, in order to see if it's possible to search that, we'll need an extremely fast computer. Turning to Seth Lloyd's article in Nature about the 'ultimate laptop' (the fastest possible computer using 1kg of mass), we see that such a device would be capable of executing 10^51 operations per second. Unfortunately, those are bit level operations, so first let us scale that by the number of bits necessary to encode a chess board state: 164 with Huffman coding. That yields 10^49 operations per second for the size of the data that our brute force algorithm will likely be working with. Now, normally at this point we would go into a discussion of evaluation functions and tree pruning, but what you want is a brute force algorithm, so no short cuts, just the right answer, for sure.
So what can we do with our 10^49 operations per second? Well, we have to search the tree and compare all the possibilities to determine which one is the optimal move. Well, that means that we have to compare all of the possible leaf nodes after ranking the path that got us there. Well, the branching factor for chess is approximately 7. So, there are about 10^42 paths to work with. Now, evaluating them means doing some hundreds of executions of our evaluation function (which will take thousands of instructions to execute). So, that means, for each of the 10^42 paths, we have to do 10^5 instructions, for a total of 10^47 instructions per move!
So, we can consider a move in a hundredth of a second. Assuming our game goes quickly (and discounting the time it takes our feeble opponent to make a decision), it'll all be over in about half a second. Unfortunately, in that time it will have consumed 2x10^26 watts. Now, you get 10^17 joules out of 1kg of mass, so we'll need 5x10^8kg of mass converted to pure energy just to power our laptop. (To give you an idea of how much matter that is, consider using lead as our source of energy: we'd need 44,000 cubic meters of lead to power our device.
So we feed our computer 500,000,000kg of lead and play the perfect game of chess in half a second. What happens to the 2x10^26 watts of energy fed into it? Well, since we just fed it into 1kg of matter occupying 1L of space, we will soon be facing an explosion equivalent to 100 solar flares compressed into a soda bottle.
So, yeah, sure, you can play a perfect game of chess...if you're prepared to annihilate a solar system. (not to mention be playing against another, equal computer, since you've only got half a second to play in):)
On my laptop which runs Windows 2000 and has IE 5.5 completely up to date (i.e., I just went to WindowsUpdate and installed the latest security updates), the exploit works on all the tests (well, except for the Minesweeper exploit targeted at Win98/ME, obviously). So, unless it's fixed in IE 6, and I see no evidence of this, then this is not something that Microsoft has addressed yet.
"i wonder if decomposing fiber optic lines are good for preservation of the ship.. or the life around it.."
Well, the bulk of fiber optic cable is pure glass, which is almost completely inert (and therefore will not 'decompose') and unlikely to hurt anything. Admittedly, most cable is further wrapped in a couple of layers of plastic, but I think the environmental impact would be fairly small, particularly if they use inert plastics or a biodegradeable material.
Certainly they would be careful to ensure that the lines would not harm the ship itself, as that is their subject.
Well, I have an old copy of windows98 from before I started using Linux. I guess that means I can install it. I didn't really read the whole EULA, but just from that snippet I don't see anything that says you have to install it on the licensed OS, just that you have to have a license for it.
Also, I wonder about Windows Media Player for the Macintosh (it exists and is called just that)...I guess their EULA is different. But in any case, since Microsoft makes an essentially identical version of WMP available for MacOS, I imagine they'd have a hard time smacking down Codeweavers, who are really just providing a way for Linux (and BSD?) users to 'enjoy' the use of Microsoft's product.
In response to that amazing discovery, I have written a letter to Ashcroft asking him to explain his change in opinion (i.e., from the sort of guy who calls the 4th amendment inviolable to the sort of guy who calls for the ability to do electronic wiretaps w/o a warrant). I strongly suggest, if you feel that the Patriot and USA Acts are unconstitutional, that you do the same, since Ashcroft pushed for a lot of that lesgislation.
whanau said:
"Currently its $348 million US, which is about the TOC of a nuclear reactor of the same capacity."
US$348 million will buy you a nuclear plant in the 1.5 Gigawatt range. It would cost about $300 million to build a new reactor comparable to the one about 5 miles from my house (Arkansas Nuclear One) which produces a total of 1694MW. Nuclear power is far, far cheaper than solar, wind, hydroelectric, you name it. Now, whether it's better is somewhat open to debate, but it is by far the most efficient way to produce really large amounts of electricity, both in terms of cost and in terms of space (the cooling tower on Unit 2 is big, but it ain't 1km big).
Well, as much as www.royal.gov.uk may have turned to Win2k and IIS, www.parliament.uk is runnning...Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on Solaris??? Even more bizarre is that site's history:
Solaris
Microsoft-IIS/4.0
13-Sep-2001
194.60.38.75
Houses of Parliament
NT4/Windows 98
Microsoft-IIS/4.0
2-Apr-2001
194.60.38.75
Houses of Parliament
Solaris
Microsoft-IIS/4.0
4-Jan-2001
194.60.38.75
Houses of Parliament
BSD/OS
Microsoft-IIS/4.0
2-Nov-2000
194.60.38.75
Houses of Parliament
So, not only does Parliament seem to like changing their minds (sometimes radically) every few months, they also like using impossible combinations of OS and server. Hmm....maybe it's symbolic of something...(just kidding!)
Well, back when the GeForce 3 was new, John Carmack mentioned in a.plan update that, when all is said and done, a GeForce 3 coupled with a fast processor (>1Ghz) ought to pump out about 30fps in Doom 3 at an acceptable resolution. So, yeah, I'd say that there's a lot of room to grow, we'll just have to wait for the engines to get written to take advantage of this power.
Reading through at +3, I see that most of the respondents have a pretty negative attitude towards this device. If it's real, then, wow...I mean, this is the sort of thing that webpads and the like need. Sure, a stylus is nice for most things, but if you need to write more than a little bit, you need a keyboard.
What's more, I think, is that one of the big size-limiting factors of making laptops much smaller than they are is the need for a keyboard. Imagine if you had a webpad style laptop that had a built-in mechanism for propping it up, and you'd just strap on the virtual keyboard doohickeys and away you'd go. By losing the keyboard, laptops could be almost half the size and a little bit lighter (admittedly, laptop keyboards don't weigh much, if you've ever taken a laptop apart, the keyboard weighs just a few ounces).
Also, I'd like to point out that when stuff like the "Smart Dust" project gets posted, people rave about how this would make for a great virtual keyboard, but when this shows up, most of the responses are along the lines of "well, even if it is real, it would suck." What the heck?
Furthermore, to all those people complaining about how they can't touch type and therefore it would be useless: maybe you should take a proper typing class or get a copy of tuxtype or mavis beacon or something. Touch typing is a valuable skill. At the very least it'll improve your ability to use vi/emacs/whatever.:)
First, engineers do not regard nuclear power as a dirty source of energy that must be contained, lest it kill everyone. I live in a small city in Arkansas (Russellville, population ~25,000) that is the site of a large nuclear power plant. I know many engineers who work at the plant and a few people involved with the construction and design of the plant (such as my father, who did the environmental impact work on the 'steam cycle,' more on that later). Those engineers regard nuclear power as an extremely safe, potentially cheap form of power. The total number of American deaths from nuclear power is incredibly small compared to that of coal/oil/natural gas and their related activities (such as coal mining).
Second, nuclear power plants can be built very cheaply. The cost of construction is only about a third of the cost of building a plant (a large plant would, if built today, cost in the neighborhood of 300 million dollars, depending on location (i.e., availability of natural cooling sources like lakes and rivers) and output). Whenever a nuclear power plant is built, the design documents, environmental impact studies, evacuation plans, etc, must all be submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as though no nuclear plants had ever been built before. Read that again. The majority of the cost of building a nuclear power plant in the United States is red tape. Nuclear power is cheap. Nuclear power plants can be cheap. In France, most of the power plants follow the same, well-tested design.
Third, the water used in the steam cycle is extremely clean. During construction of the plant, the chemists (such as my father) had a valve system in place such that they could take samples of the water at every stage in the cycle. After testing the water, the chemists would often wet their whistles with the excess. The water was just plain, distilled water. The only thing that happens to it is being heated and cooled over and over again. The steam (water vapor, technically) put off by cooling towers is likewise incredibly pure. In the Russellville case, the only thing in the water vapor other than H20 is a small amount of (non-radioactive) Xenon, which, for those of you who slept through chemistry, is inert. Perhaps you meant the coolant itself? Well, the coolant is heavily laced with Boron (in the form of Borax soap, actually), which is a neutron absorber. It's only a 'coolant' in the sense that it absorbs neutrons. Even if the Boron did become radioactive (and I'm fairly certain it doesn't), that water isn't part of the steam cycle and the Boron can be removed from the water anyway.
The majority of your fears (and the public's fears) about nuclear power are unfounded.
PS He's 'fission' and you bit, but then I bit off of your line. Who is worse, the troll, the troll who followed him, or the idiot who responded to both?;)
I subscribed to the TransGaming service on the 22nd, the day it was released. I also submitted an article to slashdot about it, but got rejected:(
Anyway, my experience has been overwhelmingly positive. The games that I have tested it with (Half-Life/Counter-strike, Baldur's Gate 1, and the Diablo II demo) have worked excellently with little or no configuration. I think Slashdot, as a major Linux news outlet, has done TransGaming a great disservice by not posting an article about it, but that's a rant I don't want to get into.
As far as what you get for your $5/month (if you don't want to go it alone with the source code) are prepackaged binaries (rpms and debs) and the ability to post in the support forums. Speaking of the support forums, I found them tremendously helpful. Two small issues I had with Baldur's Gate were resolved within half an hour of each posting, once by other subscribers and once by the TransGaming staff. They are obviously very committed to making this a success.
I really recommend that people give it a shot. If you don't have much money, give the source code version a shot. If it works (even partially) consider subscribing! $5/month isn't much (less than an hour's wages here in the States) and by subscribing you get better support and help to improve the program.
By the way, even though the TransGaming website doesn't mention the Matrox G400 in their bit about devices that work well with WineX and the DRI, I can play Counter-strike on Linux as fast as on Windows, near as I can tell. My last barrier to wiping my Windows partition is finally lifted!:)
Slashdot Mirror
As others have pointed out, the latest and greatest is already far past the recommended specs, to say nothing of these minimums.
I think it's also worth pointing out that it's difficult to even find a PC from a major manufacturer that doesn't meet these specs. In fact, I think it'd be difficult to find one even going back about 6 months. So, I'd say you're exaggerating a little, to say the least.
And as far as a flat screen monitor goes, those are actually generally considered not so great for gaming, except for a very few, very new ones, and those are just acceptable. The hardcore players still use CRTs unless they're lugging their computers to a LAN party.
To be sure, back in the day, there wasn't much difference between high and low quality. Heck, back in the Wolfenstein 3D era, about all you could change was the screensize. These days, though, the difference between everything turned on and the bare minimum is pretty substantial. Check out a modern game like FarCry for an example.
Actually, given that ATi and nVidia are the only two major players left in the 3d gaming market, the fact that their names are being tossed around does indeed mean nothing.
I don't know if you're misinformed or just didn't check your sources (I would certainly hesitate to claim that you're lying outright), but hydergine is most defninitely approved for use in the US. Furthermore, while the company that makes it (Novartis) is primarily a Swiss company born out of the merger of Ciba and Sandoz (the company Hoffman was working for), I imagine any patents they had on the stuff have long since run out as it was discovered in the late 1940s.
My sources:
FDA approval
Discovery date
No, I don't think it will. First off, even if the picture is perfect, it's still a picture in a monitor. There's still a disconnect there. Furthermore, the sound isn't perfect, and the tactile feel of, for instance, the gun firing wouldn't be there. Likewise the smells.
Having played a fair number of first person shooters, done a fair bit of target shooting, and a small amount of hunting, I can say that, for me at least, no game (barring one with some kind of neural interface) will ever have the level of immersion necessary to really desensitize me to violence, particularly any violence that I might commit myself.
Syphilis, hopefully. :)
/obvious
Actually, checking on my Win2K laptop, that's not available, and I'm running the latest service pack and updates. I suspect from other posts that it may be available with XP. Perhaps the Wired offices haven't upgraded yet? :)
As the article and summary both mention, the release comes a week before the Premiere's visit to the US. An article in Der Spiegel claims, however, that the release was primarily motivated by the visit of German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.
An AP version of the story mentions Schroeders visit (which the Reuters story linked to by the summary does not), but does not go as far as claiming as Der Spiegel does that "[the release] is a gift for Schroeder" (my translation). That particular quote is attributed to Frank Lu of the Information Center for Democracy and Human Rights, a Hong Kong-based watchdog group that is a primary source for both the AP and Spiegel articles.
I suspect this is going to lead (post-2005) to a grey market in tuners and sets that are either actually old enough to be grandfathered in or are alleged to be old enough by the people selling them.
On top of that, of course, there'll be an outright black market in DRM-less tuners just like there's a black market in cable/satellite descramblers now.
All that said, I wonder if prices on devices like the mentioned DTV->MPEG2 converter are about to shoot up?
(As a sidenote, I really love how the various lobbyists and politicians are going on and on about how all of this is for the consumer's protection. Protection from what, exactly? Accidentally taping over home movies with the latest episode of the Sopranos?! But then, if our job is to consume, then recording a show is slacking off on the job.)
Checking www.gideons.org and the everything2.com entry for "Gideons Bible" shows that, actually, the Gideons fully intend for the Bibles to be taken by people who are interested in doing so. They gladly replace them for free.
That was essentially the idea behind the my.mp3.com service (you put a CD in your drive, mp3.com software figures out what CD it is, you can download mp3s of that CD from any computer once you login, occasionally you have to furnish the CD again). My mp3.com didn't last long. The RIAA put a stop to it almost immediately.
An identical idea was/is being tried with ROMs: essentially an online video game rental service. Last I heard Nintendo and their ilk were trying their damndest to shut it down.
Of course, it seems obvious to us that such an idea is clearly within the bounds of technology, the law, and reason. The way Nintendo and the RIAA see it, however, is that they can simply get more money by making everyone buy their own copies of games and music, so that's what they're pushing for, technology, the law, and reason be damned.
"First, the whole "my religion doesn't allow me to look at porn" argument is just nuts. If you truly believe this, you won't need your big brother (or whomever) to watch you."
Ahh, while it's technically true that one wouldn't 'need' ones big brother watching over one, it certainly can't help. And of course the method would be useful for nonreligious people who want to curb their porn viewing (or addiction) for other reasons.
"Second, what about self control? Okay, you don't want to look at porn. So the only way you can stop is to have your PC report which sites you visit to Grandma?"
Is this the "only way you can stop?" No, but accountability-based methods are some of the best ways to stop addictive behaviors. Alcoholics anonymous and other groups modelled after it make use of group meetings for a reason. And generally, one would confide in someone that one sees on a regular basis, which probably isn't Grandma.
"Finally, if you want to look at porn, look at porn. If your religion forbids it, well, that sucks... but otherwise, who the hell cares if you look at porn? I enjoy it, am not ashamed of it, and I certainly don't need anyone else (or any religion) scrutinizing what sites I visit."
People who do not follow a religion or whose religion does not specifically forbid the viewing of porn may still wish to curb their habit for several reasons:
1) their spouse dislikes porn
2) they have children in the house and don't want to be viewing something that their children can't (by law)
3) they are not of age and their parents want to use an accountability-based method to make sure that their child isn't breaking the law
4) they don't want to feel addicted to something
5) they decide that porn degrades women, sex, etc
"So next we'll be CCing our Visa bill to someone, to curb excessive spending; faxing the grocery list/receipt to help with over-eating; and so on. Do these people actually need a babysitter? If so, what are they doing living on their own, let alone surfing the 'Net without supervision?"
Managing money effectively is largely a taught or learned skill, not an inborn ability. People who did not have the benefit of being taught that particular skill by their parents, peers, or educators (as a great deal of people in the western world have not been, given the high rates of personal debt in those parts) may well need assistance later in life to help deal with bad spending habits. Similarly, people who overeat for whatever reason (low self-esteem, actual glandular problems, laziness, etc) may well desire some help in improving themselves. Which I think is the strangest part of your little diatribe: what is so wrong with a person wanting to fix something they see wrong with himself or herself and then having the courage to admit that they cannot do it on their own or at least could use a little help?
I for one applaud that courage, even if I or others may have different moral opinions regarding that same behavior in ourselves.
Consider two cooks/chefs, both having practiced their art for 30 or 40 years. Both receive rave reviews from those they serve and both have a wide repertoire to choose from. One is a 50 year-old grandmother and the other is chef at a 5-star restaurant. Do you think there is a difference between the cooking of a 'classically trained' chef and an ordinary person who has simply cooked for long enough to 'know their way around the kitchen?'
I consider in particular that a lot of chef schools and restaurants emphasize learning certain basic skills such as chopping onions and making sauces (or at least they use the student chefs as cheap labor to accomplish those uninteresting but important kitchen tasks), whereas a person teaching a child or grandchild to cook might just dive in to a complete meal. So, do you think cooking philosophies matter, or even exist as a useful way to differentiate chefs and/or cuisine?
There was a slashdot poll about this a long, long time ago (about the time I started reading slashdot, in fact...heh, even then there were people whining about how "slashdot had changed" and "we never have cool polls anymore...like that one about the toilet paper").
Ahh, here it is. The winner with 60% of 13401 votes is "Over". Under got 12%, 18% didn't care, and 8% answered "Huh?" I guess the "Huh?" group lives/lived in societies that don't use toilet paper (either because they use bidets or just go without...)
This question comes up quite a bit. The answer hasn't changed in years because of the way the question is usually posed. You asked, essentially, if it is possible to solve chess by searching the entire move tree. Then you asked if it could be done with an infinite amount of processing power and memory. Well, of course it can be done with an infinite amount of each. The trick, as you then go on to ask about, is to do it in a finite amount of both.
:)
Well, first of, the search space for chess is on the order of 10^43. Now, that's a lot. So, in order to see if it's possible to search that, we'll need an extremely fast computer. Turning to Seth Lloyd's article in Nature about the 'ultimate laptop' (the fastest possible computer using 1kg of mass), we see that such a device would be capable of executing 10^51 operations per second. Unfortunately, those are bit level operations, so first let us scale that by the number of bits necessary to encode a chess board state: 164 with Huffman coding. That yields 10^49 operations per second for the size of the data that our brute force algorithm will likely be working with. Now, normally at this point we would go into a discussion of evaluation functions and tree pruning, but what you want is a brute force algorithm, so no short cuts, just the right answer, for sure.
So what can we do with our 10^49 operations per second? Well, we have to search the tree and compare all the possibilities to determine which one is the optimal move. Well, that means that we have to compare all of the possible leaf nodes after ranking the path that got us there. Well, the branching factor for chess is approximately 7. So, there are about 10^42 paths to work with. Now, evaluating them means doing some hundreds of executions of our evaluation function (which will take thousands of instructions to execute). So, that means, for each of the 10^42 paths, we have to do 10^5 instructions, for a total of 10^47 instructions per move!
So, we can consider a move in a hundredth of a second. Assuming our game goes quickly (and discounting the time it takes our feeble opponent to make a decision), it'll all be over in about half a second. Unfortunately, in that time it will have consumed 2x10^26 watts. Now, you get 10^17 joules out of 1kg of mass, so we'll need 5x10^8kg of mass converted to pure energy just to power our laptop. (To give you an idea of how much matter that is, consider using lead as our source of energy: we'd need 44,000 cubic meters of lead to power our device.
So we feed our computer 500,000,000kg of lead and play the perfect game of chess in half a second. What happens to the 2x10^26 watts of energy fed into it? Well, since we just fed it into 1kg of matter occupying 1L of space, we will soon be facing an explosion equivalent to 100 solar flares compressed into a soda bottle.
So, yeah, sure, you can play a perfect game of chess...if you're prepared to annihilate a solar system. (not to mention be playing against another, equal computer, since you've only got half a second to play in)
On my laptop which runs Windows 2000 and has IE 5.5 completely up to date (i.e., I just went to WindowsUpdate and installed the latest security updates), the exploit works on all the tests (well, except for the Minesweeper exploit targeted at Win98/ME, obviously).
So, unless it's fixed in IE 6, and I see no evidence of this, then this is not something that Microsoft has addressed yet.
"i wonder if decomposing fiber optic lines are good for preservation of the ship.. or the life around it.."
Well, the bulk of fiber optic cable is pure glass, which is almost completely inert (and therefore will not 'decompose') and unlikely to hurt anything. Admittedly, most cable is further wrapped in a couple of layers of plastic, but I think the environmental impact would be fairly small, particularly if they use inert plastics or a biodegradeable material.
Certainly they would be careful to ensure that the lines would not harm the ship itself, as that is their subject.
Well, I have an old copy of windows98 from before I started using Linux. I guess that means I can install it. I didn't really read the whole EULA, but just from that snippet I don't see anything that says you have to install it on the licensed OS, just that you have to have a license for it.
Also, I wonder about Windows Media Player for the Macintosh (it exists and is called just that)...I guess their EULA is different. But in any case, since Microsoft makes an essentially identical version of WMP available for MacOS, I imagine they'd have a hard time smacking down Codeweavers, who are really just providing a way for Linux (and BSD?) users to 'enjoy' the use of Microsoft's product.
In response to that amazing discovery, I have written a letter to Ashcroft asking him to explain his change in opinion (i.e., from the sort of guy who calls the 4th amendment inviolable to the sort of guy who calls for the ability to do electronic wiretaps w/o a warrant). I strongly suggest, if you feel that the Patriot and USA Acts are unconstitutional, that you do the same, since Ashcroft pushed for a lot of that lesgislation.
whanau said:
"Currently its $348 million US, which is about the TOC of a nuclear reactor of the same capacity."
US$348 million will buy you a nuclear plant in the 1.5 Gigawatt range. It would cost about $300 million to build a new reactor comparable to the one about 5 miles from my house (Arkansas Nuclear One) which produces a total of 1694MW. Nuclear power is far, far cheaper than solar, wind, hydroelectric, you name it. Now, whether it's better is somewhat open to debate, but it is by far the most efficient way to produce really large amounts of electricity, both in terms of cost and in terms of space (the cooling tower on Unit 2 is big, but it ain't 1km big).
Well, as much as www.royal.gov.uk may have turned to Win2k and IIS, www.parliament.uk is runnning...Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on Solaris???
Even more bizarre is that site's history:
Solaris
Microsoft-IIS/4.0
13-Sep-2001
194.60.38.75
Houses of Parliament
NT4/Windows 98
Microsoft-IIS/4.0
2-Apr-2001
194.60.38.75
Houses of Parliament
Solaris
Microsoft-IIS/4.0
4-Jan-2001
194.60.38.75
Houses of Parliament
BSD/OS
Microsoft-IIS/4.0
2-Nov-2000
194.60.38.75
Houses of Parliament
So, not only does Parliament seem to like changing their minds (sometimes radically) every few months, they also like using impossible combinations of OS and server. Hmm....maybe it's symbolic of something...(just kidding!)
Well, back when the GeForce 3 was new, John Carmack mentioned in a .plan update that, when all is said and done, a GeForce 3 coupled with a fast processor (>1Ghz) ought to pump out about 30fps in Doom 3 at an acceptable resolution. So, yeah, I'd say that there's a lot of room to grow, we'll just have to wait for the engines to get written to take advantage of this power.
Reading through at +3, I see that most of the respondents have a pretty negative attitude towards this device. If it's real, then, wow...I mean, this is the sort of thing that webpads and the like need. Sure, a stylus is nice for most things, but if you need to write more than a little bit, you need a keyboard.
:)
What's more, I think, is that one of the big size-limiting factors of making laptops much smaller than they are is the need for a keyboard. Imagine if you had a webpad style laptop that had a built-in mechanism for propping it up, and you'd just strap on the virtual keyboard doohickeys and away you'd go. By losing the keyboard, laptops could be almost half the size and a little bit lighter (admittedly, laptop keyboards don't weigh much, if you've ever taken a laptop apart, the keyboard weighs just a few ounces).
Also, I'd like to point out that when stuff like the "Smart Dust" project gets posted, people rave about how this would make for a great virtual keyboard, but when this shows up, most of the responses are along the lines of "well, even if it is real, it would suck." What the heck?
Furthermore, to all those people complaining about how they can't touch type and therefore it would be useless: maybe you should take a proper typing class or get a copy of tuxtype or mavis beacon or something. Touch typing is a valuable skill. At the very least it'll improve your ability to use vi/emacs/whatever.
3 points.
;)
First, engineers do not regard nuclear power as a dirty source of energy that must be contained, lest it kill everyone. I live in a small city in Arkansas (Russellville, population ~25,000) that is the site of a large nuclear power plant. I know many engineers who work at the plant and a few people involved with the construction and design of the plant (such as my father, who did the environmental impact work on the 'steam cycle,' more on that later). Those engineers regard nuclear power as an extremely safe, potentially cheap form of power. The total number of American deaths from nuclear power is incredibly small compared to that of coal/oil/natural gas and their related activities (such as coal mining).
Second, nuclear power plants can be built very cheaply. The cost of construction is only about a third of the cost of building a plant (a large plant would, if built today, cost in the neighborhood of 300 million dollars, depending on location (i.e., availability of natural cooling sources like lakes and rivers) and output). Whenever a nuclear power plant is built, the design documents, environmental impact studies, evacuation plans, etc, must all be submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as though no nuclear plants had ever been built before. Read that again. The majority of the cost of building a nuclear power plant in the United States is red tape. Nuclear power is cheap. Nuclear power plants can be cheap. In France, most of the power plants follow the same, well-tested design.
Third, the water used in the steam cycle is extremely clean. During construction of the plant, the chemists (such as my father) had a valve system in place such that they could take samples of the water at every stage in the cycle. After testing the water, the chemists would often wet their whistles with the excess. The water was just plain, distilled water. The only thing that happens to it is being heated and cooled over and over again. The steam (water vapor, technically) put off by cooling towers is likewise incredibly pure. In the Russellville case, the only thing in the water vapor other than H20 is a small amount of (non-radioactive) Xenon, which, for those of you who slept through chemistry, is inert. Perhaps you meant the coolant itself? Well, the coolant is heavily laced with Boron (in the form of Borax soap, actually), which is a neutron absorber. It's only a 'coolant' in the sense that it absorbs neutrons. Even if the Boron did become radioactive (and I'm fairly certain it doesn't), that water isn't part of the steam cycle and the Boron can be removed from the water anyway.
The majority of your fears (and the public's fears) about nuclear power are unfounded.
PS He's 'fission' and you bit, but then I bit off of your line. Who is worse, the troll, the troll who followed him, or the idiot who responded to both?
*cough* I do believe you mean GNU/Winux
(This has got to be one of the most tired jokes on the planet)
I subscribed to the TransGaming service on the 22nd, the day it was released. I also submitted an article to slashdot about it, but got rejected :(
:)
Anyway, my experience has been overwhelmingly positive. The games that I have tested it with (Half-Life/Counter-strike, Baldur's Gate 1, and the Diablo II demo) have worked excellently with little or no configuration. I think Slashdot, as a major Linux news outlet, has done TransGaming a great disservice by not posting an article about it, but that's a rant I don't want to get into.
As far as what you get for your $5/month (if you don't want to go it alone with the source code) are prepackaged binaries (rpms and debs) and the ability to post in the support forums. Speaking of the support forums, I found them tremendously helpful. Two small issues I had with Baldur's Gate were resolved within half an hour of each posting, once by other subscribers and once by the TransGaming staff. They are obviously very committed to making this a success.
I really recommend that people give it a shot. If you don't have much money, give the source code version a shot. If it works (even partially) consider subscribing! $5/month isn't much (less than an hour's wages here in the States) and by subscribing you get better support and help to improve the program.
By the way, even though the TransGaming website doesn't mention the Matrox G400 in their bit about devices that work well with WineX and the DRI, I can play Counter-strike on Linux as fast as on Windows, near as I can tell. My last barrier to wiping my Windows partition is finally lifted!