When I had the Pentium 4, she complained about its narrowness, but its was great. With the G4 Mac, it was nicely wide, but too short, she would note. I'm sure that with the 970, I can fulfill all her dreams!
But Bust-A-Move isn't really at all anything like Tetris. I can see how it could have gotten its inspiration from Tetris, but that's where the similarities end.
Sorry, I hate to break this to you, but Bust-A-Move wouldn't be that hard of a problem to solve polynomially, especially if you knew ahead of time all the pieces you would get. However, there is a small possibility that you could have a game that is impossible to solve (via the order of colors, and the colors you already have.)
The Hellenic Civilization (ancient Greece) lasted for 400 years. The Roman Empire lasted, essentially, for almost 1000 years. Ancient Egypt lasted for over 3000 years. Both Japan's and Britain's imperial system still exists, even if they don't hold the same powers anymore. What's your point?
Come back in 10000 years, and if nothing has changed (politically and socially), then go ahead and tell us that.
There are a lot of people out there that would like to save the world (myself being one of them.) Mr. Gates happens to be in a position to accomplish part of that goal. That doesn't mean that he can actually do so. A lot of his donations go to medical research, which will help everybody, not just foreign people.
Besides, what's so wrong about bragging rights? It gives the affluent a reason to give in the first place. Sure, it would be better if they did it purely for altruistic reasons, but that's not being realistic.
Besides, how often do you really hear about the Gates Foundation in the news anyway (besides here on slashdot, since we're somewhat biased anyway)? I could walk up to ten people right now who would not know that the Gates Foundation exists until I told them about it. I'm actually surprised at how quiet the Gates (and even Microsoft) is about all those contributions.
I have read lots of literature on Mr. Gates, and all of it leads me to the same conclusion, he really does care about all the contributions he makes, and it really isn't about bragging rights, but he's more than happy to show anyone all his contributions. He just doesn't have the same altruistic motives when it comes to business.
Don't forget that Debian has been ported to eleven, yes, eleven different processors. That's a lot of packages, and and each processor has three versions out there that are distributed concurrently. Each one carries over 3000 packages. To mirror a Debian archive, you need 60 GB of free space.
Re:What (cool thing) could you do w/multiple devic
on
Tackling AGP 8X
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· Score: 2
If you had the right kind of glasses, you could have real 3d perspectives in any application you choose. The two eye pieces would display a scene with the camera in two different positions, with each card rendering the scene from the two different cameras.
In more practical terms, it makes a lot of things easier. I can, in a GUI environment, have Emacs or VIM running on the two different monitors, and if I have each session of the respective editor displaying two different files, that's four files I can be editing at the same time without having to flip through a bunch of desktops or windows sitting on top of each other, which can get pretty old pretty fast. Many times I just want to be able to look at a piece of code really quickly, instead of having to switch through a whole bunch of windows sitting on top of each other.
I would love to see the algorithm that brute forces Go, because, currently, there isn't any. Sure, we may have the computing power in ten years to do so, but will we have the algorithm?
The problem with Go is that you can't use the traditional game AIs (such as min-max.) Most games can easily be brute forced by creating a tree of all the moves, and then creating an algorithm to traverse that tree (e.g. depth first, breadth first, A*, etc.) You could create a tree of all possible moves, but the tree would be useless since it many moves have the same amount of significance. You would end up placing lots of random pieces on the board until you can see a definite sequence of moves to capture [a] piece[s]. That, in my opinion, is not a brute force algorithm.
Using it since lunch. Every KDE release seems to get faster and faster. It's actually faster than fluxbox. F' plain window managers if full desktop environments are faster than them. F' twm.
Yeah, it's too bad their servers aren't nearly as fast under the/. load.
What if a person has very in depth knowledge of the inner workings of Moonlight|3D, but not Blender3D, and has ideas about computer graphics that s/he wants to implement, and would rather spend the time actually coding the implementation rather than trying to figure out how Blender3D works.
Any actual working implementation of an idea is a lot better than vapourware, and its easier to implement something with tools you already understand how to use.
Mr. Torvalds still held the copyright on the Linux kernel, which, from my perspective, is more than enough to say that it's his project. Sure, it's under the GPL, but the GPL only dictates what other people may do with their copies of the software, not what happens to the copyright itself. Once that copyright runs out, then it will truly belong to the community in the form of public domain.
If you want a truly community owned OS+kernel, then check out one of the *BSDs.
Firstly, this isn't your project. Mr. Torvalds has made his points and position quite clear, and it's time that you and the rest of the Free Software people leave the kernel hackers well enough alone.
Also, do you have no respect what's so ever? What are you doing posting on the LKML, which is not meant to be political.
Also, it would be nice if you would get your facts straight. Bitkeeper (the gratis version, anyway) only restricts you from using it to develop a competing project, not from using one.
A lot of people seem to misunderstand that most of the debate surrounding Red Hat's changes has to do with unified look and feel.
It's not that that I, and many other KDE-philes, have a problem with (in fact, I and many others support the idea), it's the seeming favouritism for GNOME applications for the default shortcuts. In fact, I don't know if any of the default shortcuts link to a KDE-based application. For example, why not setup a default shortcut to Quanta? It's a highly respected web-development editor.
Re:I know you're kidding, but....
on
Undelete In Linux
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· Score: 2, Interesting
This is not meant to be a troll, I am seriously asking a question.
What's not so easy to use under KDE? Whenever I let people use my machine who've only used Windows, they have no problems doing so, unless I happen to have the BeOS window decorations on, but that's understandable. Now, mind you, the only things in my GUI that I concern myself with configuring are the look-n-feel elements, otherwise, I mostly just leave it to the installed defaults. Beyond that, I only concern myself with configuring things like Apache, sshd, samba, or some other such arcane Unix utility.
The launch was spectacular and the rocket was performing as planned. However, the rocket experienced motor failure during the flight and the flight was terminated
Ah, yes, it performed according to plan just like my motherboard's IDE controller when it died on me and I had to get a new motherboard, and turn this one into a network computer. Yup, all according to plan...
MSNBC article not about MS is surprising?
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AOL's new Linux PC
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· Score: 1
MSNBC (of all places ) has an intersting article about AOLs new PC.
Why is this surprising? Microsoft wants MSNBC to be a good news agency. They can't rightly do that if Microsoft is telling them what to right. Microsoft has done a very good job of staying out of their way.
Microsoft does some iffy things, but there is no reason to brand them a completely evil entity. It's very large, and when you have an entity as large as that, there is no way to track what all the pieces do.
I don't know about anyone else, but I want people to switch to OSS not necessarily for those reasons, but also because they feel that OSS will get the job done better.
Of course, that is in no way in touch with reality. The reality is that commercial organizations switch to new technologies usually due to financial reasons. If the new technologies also happen to get the job done better, then that is a bonus, not a necessity.
Self-organizing, when talking about computer science (more specifically, artificial intelligence), usually refers to self organizing maps (SOMs), not genetic programming. The two are vastly different, although a person could use genetic programming to create a more efficient SOM.
SOMs are a type of neural network. Neural networks are based on the way the brain works, and the mathematics of how they work are not completely understood. The two most common neural networks are feed forward neural networks (FFNNs) and SOMs. How they work is outside the scope of this post. Google has quite a bit of information on them.
Genetic programming (which is what is used here) tries large numbers of random combinations of environment variables to try to find the answer, or something close. It keeps track of what works best, and keeps those combinations until something better is found.
This is not a particularly exciting article since the computer did not actually learn anything in any sense of the word. It merely found a setup that accomplished the goal. The only reason it's of any interest is that genetic programming can sometimes come up with "ingenius" solutions (i.e. something a person would likely not think of) since genetic programming has no boundaries within which to work with. All of it is nothing more than what nature itself does, and that's all random. It took nature almost 15 billion years to create humans.
That's pretty slow, if you ask me. I'll bet we humans could easily one-up nature.
I think what would have been exciting would have been if this had been discovered using a SOM.
Slashdot Mirror
When I had the Pentium 4, she complained about its narrowness, but its was great. With the G4 Mac, it was nicely wide, but too short, she would note. I'm sure that with the 970, I can fulfill all her dreams!
The Nazis of WWII felt that they were doing nothing wrong either, and they too slept just fine.
But Bust-A-Move isn't really at all anything like Tetris. I can see how it could have gotten its inspiration from Tetris, but that's where the similarities end.
Sorry, I hate to break this to you, but Bust-A-Move wouldn't be that hard of a problem to solve polynomially, especially if you knew ahead of time all the pieces you would get. However, there is a small possibility that you could have a game that is impossible to solve (via the order of colors, and the colors you already have.)
What?! What are you talking about? My boss, she and I...
Err, crap, can't talk about that, I signed an NDA about that sort of stuff.
The Hellenic Civilization (ancient Greece) lasted for 400 years. The Roman Empire lasted, essentially, for almost 1000 years. Ancient Egypt lasted for over 3000 years. Both Japan's and Britain's imperial system still exists, even if they don't hold the same powers anymore. What's your point?
Come back in 10000 years, and if nothing has changed (politically and socially), then go ahead and tell us that.
There are a lot of people out there that would like to save the world (myself being one of them.) Mr. Gates happens to be in a position to accomplish part of that goal. That doesn't mean that he can actually do so. A lot of his donations go to medical research, which will help everybody, not just foreign people.
You might also want to take note that he has a section of his foundation that is dedicated to helping out the poor in his area. That doesn't exactly seem, to me anyway, the way to give the country you owe your millions to the middle finger.
Besides, what's so wrong about bragging rights? It gives the affluent a reason to give in the first place. Sure, it would be better if they did it purely for altruistic reasons, but that's not being realistic.
Besides, how often do you really hear about the Gates Foundation in the news anyway (besides here on slashdot, since we're somewhat biased anyway)? I could walk up to ten people right now who would not know that the Gates Foundation exists until I told them about it. I'm actually surprised at how quiet the Gates (and even Microsoft) is about all those contributions.
I have read lots of literature on Mr. Gates, and all of it leads me to the same conclusion, he really does care about all the contributions he makes, and it really isn't about bragging rights, but he's more than happy to show anyone all his contributions. He just doesn't have the same altruistic motives when it comes to business.
Don't forget that Debian has been ported to eleven, yes, eleven different processors. That's a lot of packages, and and each processor has three versions out there that are distributed concurrently. Each one carries over 3000 packages. To mirror a Debian archive, you need 60 GB of free space.
http://www.debian.org/mirror/size
If you had the right kind of glasses, you could have real 3d perspectives in any application you choose. The two eye pieces would display a scene with the camera in two different positions, with each card rendering the scene from the two different cameras.
In more practical terms, it makes a lot of things easier. I can, in a GUI environment, have Emacs or VIM running on the two different monitors, and if I have each session of the respective editor displaying two different files, that's four files I can be editing at the same time without having to flip through a bunch of desktops or windows sitting on top of each other, which can get pretty old pretty fast. Many times I just want to be able to look at a piece of code really quickly, instead of having to switch through a whole bunch of windows sitting on top of each other.
I would love to see the algorithm that brute forces Go, because, currently, there isn't any. Sure, we may have the computing power in ten years to do so, but will we have the algorithm?
The problem with Go is that you can't use the traditional game AIs (such as min-max.) Most games can easily be brute forced by creating a tree of all the moves, and then creating an algorithm to traverse that tree (e.g. depth first, breadth first, A*, etc.) You could create a tree of all possible moves, but the tree would be useless since it many moves have the same amount of significance. You would end up placing lots of random pieces on the board until you can see a definite sequence of moves to capture [a] piece[s]. That, in my opinion, is not a brute force algorithm.
Yeah, it's too bad their servers aren't nearly as fast under the
What if a person has very in depth knowledge of the inner workings of Moonlight|3D, but not Blender3D, and has ideas about computer graphics that s/he wants to implement, and would rather spend the time actually coding the implementation rather than trying to figure out how Blender3D works.
Any actual working implementation of an idea is a lot better than vapourware, and its easier to implement something with tools you already understand how to use.
It's all about choice, really.
Mr. Torvalds still held the copyright on the Linux kernel, which, from my perspective, is more than enough to say that it's his project. Sure, it's under the GPL, but the GPL only dictates what other people may do with their copies of the software, not what happens to the copyright itself. Once that copyright runs out, then it will truly belong to the community in the form of public domain.
If you want a truly community owned OS+kernel, then check out one of the *BSDs.
Firstly, this isn't your project. Mr. Torvalds has made his points and position quite clear, and it's time that you and the rest of the Free Software people leave the kernel hackers well enough alone.
Also, do you have no respect what's so ever? What are you doing posting on the LKML, which is not meant to be political.
Also, it would be nice if you would get your facts straight. Bitkeeper (the gratis version, anyway) only restricts you from using it to develop a competing project, not from using one.
A lot of people seem to misunderstand that most of the debate surrounding Red Hat's changes has to do with unified look and feel.
It's not that that I, and many other KDE-philes, have a problem with (in fact, I and many others support the idea), it's the seeming favouritism for GNOME applications for the default shortcuts. In fact, I don't know if any of the default shortcuts link to a KDE-based application. For example, why not setup a default shortcut to Quanta? It's a highly respected web-development editor.
This is not meant to be a troll, I am seriously asking a question.
What's not so easy to use under KDE? Whenever I let people use my machine who've only used Windows, they have no problems doing so, unless I happen to have the BeOS window decorations on, but that's understandable. Now, mind you, the only things in my GUI that I concern myself with configuring are the look-n-feel elements, otherwise, I mostly just leave it to the installed defaults. Beyond that, I only concern myself with configuring things like Apache, sshd, samba, or some other such arcane Unix utility.
Ah, yes, it performed according to plan just like my motherboard's IDE controller when it died on me and I had to get a new motherboard, and turn this one into a network computer. Yup, all according to plan...
Why is this surprising? Microsoft wants MSNBC to be a good news agency. They can't rightly do that if Microsoft is telling them what to right. Microsoft has done a very good job of staying out of their way.
Microsoft does some iffy things, but there is no reason to brand them a completely evil entity. It's very large, and when you have an entity as large as that, there is no way to track what all the pieces do.
It's called "pulling the power cable."
Yeah! It's the return of text-based games!
Oh, that kind of console game...
Does this mean that slashdot editors will start using proper grammar and spelling?
Can any of them instantly change the colour depth without restarting X? That's one things that has always irked me about X.
...to switch?
I don't know about anyone else, but I want people to switch to OSS not necessarily for those reasons, but also because they feel that OSS will get the job done better.
Of course, that is in no way in touch with reality. The reality is that commercial organizations switch to new technologies usually due to financial reasons. If the new technologies also happen to get the job done better, then that is a bonus, not a necessity.
Self-organizing, when talking about computer science (more specifically, artificial intelligence), usually refers to self organizing maps (SOMs), not genetic programming. The two are vastly different, although a person could use genetic programming to create a more efficient SOM.
SOMs are a type of neural network. Neural networks are based on the way the brain works, and the mathematics of how they work are not completely understood. The two most common neural networks are feed forward neural networks (FFNNs) and SOMs. How they work is outside the scope of this post. Google has quite a bit of information on them.
Genetic programming (which is what is used here) tries large numbers of random combinations of environment variables to try to find the answer, or something close. It keeps track of what works best, and keeps those combinations until something better is found.
This is not a particularly exciting article since the computer did not actually learn anything in any sense of the word. It merely found a setup that accomplished the goal. The only reason it's of any interest is that genetic programming can sometimes come up with "ingenius" solutions (i.e. something a person would likely not think of) since genetic programming has no boundaries within which to work with. All of it is nothing more than what nature itself does, and that's all random. It took nature almost 15 billion years to create humans.
That's pretty slow, if you ask me. I'll bet we humans could easily one-up nature.
I think what would have been exciting would have been if this had been discovered using a SOM.
What better place than here to find insomniacs?
Cowboy Neal is obviously no exception to the rule:
"Posted by CowboyNeal on Thursday August 29, @02:15AM"