Not knowing anything about Linux, I would recommend having a friend help you set up your computer and having him available once in a while to ask how to do stuff. You'll get the hang of the OS pretty quickly though. I got my friend up and running with Fedora Core 1 a couple of weeks ago, and he just installed the mouse gesture plugin for Mozilla by himself yesterday. I'm so proud. *sniff*
It seems like for every cool CCG Atlas comes out with, there's another one that people anticipate that gets cut before production.
Anybody ever hear about the Amber CCG? I was really looking forward to that one. A year after it was supposed to have come out, I was still waiting for it... then I found out it had been cut.
Maybe they'll bring it to term though - here's hoping:)
I still drive an '88 Toyota Corolla that was purchased new. It has *never* had any major problems.
The timing belt has been changed twice (once at 65K miles, once at 130K), tires and brake pads replaced every couple of years, battery replaced three or four times (mainly due to me accidentally leaving the headlights on too often), and the only bit of non-routine maintenance that I can recall is that the distributor cap needed to be replaced last year because it was cracked. It has started to chug a quart of oil a month, but I can live with that.
Toyotas are superbly engineered vehicles, built to withstand years of driving. I am very pleased with mine and I wouldn't consider buying any other brand to replace it when I start to think about it in another 20 years when flying cars become available.:)
Radiohead and DJ Shadow are one thing, but Sigur Ros has released the vast majority of their albums on non-RIAA labels. Just because they made a mistake once, we shouldn't continue to punish them for it.:)
Holy crap, Microsoft can find your physical mailing address if you download their source code...
Does that mean those people I laughed at in high school for circulating that thing about Bill Gates sending you $100 for forwarding this email were RIGHT?!
Damn, now I wish I'd been stupid enough to send that thing on - I could use an extra hundred bucks.
Gnu Go is so very *not* 8k. When I was 10k on KGS I beat it by 20 points in an even game. Now I'm 9k on KGS (although slightly underrated) and I beat the most recent version by over 100 points the other day giving it 3 handicap stones.
It really falls apart in the middle game. It does things like trying to attack my stones but the strength I build up allows me to crush a weak group on the other side of where it was attacking me from. It needs a *lot* of work to understand the whole board. Maybe it would give me a decent game with 5 handicap stones. That would put it around 12k, if we assume I'm 2 stones underrated on KGS.
Technically, when the word "whither" was in style, sentence structure was a bit more confusing. Whither was really a replacement for "To what place..." with a couple of words generally being implied.
"Where are you going?" would often be spoken as "Whither going?", meaning "To what place [are you] going?"
"Whither Mountain Dew?" isn't so far of the bat as all that, as it would be taken to mean "Where is the Mountain Dew?" or "To what place [can be found / is] Mountain Dew?"
I went to their website because it sounded cool, but the only info I could find is that it's a mod for Q3A...
Well I already KNEW that. I want to know what the storyline is about! I read the FAQ and the "Background Information" portion of the manual. Apparently nothing on their website tells you anything at all about what the point of the game is.
Is it just Q3A with different weapons (in other words, pointless)? What the hell is it?
Also, having the president fall off of one - in public no less - is probably not the best publicity you could have.
Wait a sec... the President?!?! Are you talking about Bush? Do you have footage? Can you set up an FTP site or a torrent?
That would be the best publicity EVER! I know after watching that (over and over and over), I'd be saving up my hard-earned for a Segway.
You should attend a workshop taught by Yang Yilun. He's a 7-dan Chinese pro who teaches in the U.S. Usually the workshops run all weekend for about $200-250. He is an excellent teacher and has written several books, including one coming out soon from Slate and Shell.
The most impressive thing I've ever seen is at the one workshop I've been to by him. He took all of the students (eighteen), divided us up into pairs (so they can discuss moves with one another), and played us all simultaneously. Then after beating us all (even the pair composed of Keith Arnold, 5 dan and Eagles Song, 4 dan) we cleared off the boards, then he sat down with the first pair, replayed their game from memory, and commented on what they could have done better. Then he replayed the second game from memory... and kept going all the way around the circle.
He's got another workshop coming up in June, I believe. It's in New Jersey. I'm definitely making the trek.
Go was brought to the west via contact with Japan - that's why it's called "Go" here. The game is known as "Igo" in Japan, "Wei qi" in China, and "Paduk" in Korea. The technical terms used in the west are also all Japanese terms (most amateur go players in the US will know what "miai", "hane", "tengen", "joseki", and "aji" mean, for example), even though China and Korea have their own equivalents.
Evidence shows that go was originally brought to Japan via Buddhist monks from China though. Evidence of go in China predates written records, so it's not certain whether it originated there or was brought from elsewhere.
Before Tartrate got so famous (infamous?) amateur go players were keeping track of how many games they were away from having played Honinbo Shuusaku of the Edo period.
My Shuusaku number is 5 -- Shusaku (0) - Iwasaki Kenzo (1) - Honinbo Shusai (2) - Iwamoto Kaoru (3) - James Kerwin (4) - Ethan Baldridge (5).
One of the coolest games on the KGS archives is Tartrate vs. Redrose (Irina Shikshina, a Russian woman who is a 1st dan Korean professional). Tartrate was black and played his first move on tengen (the center of the board), which is an unusual opening. There were two ENORMOUS ko fights, and everybody thought Redrose had won after the first one was over. Check it out, it's a great game.
If anybody wants a Shuusaku number of 6 and/or a Tartrate number of 3, my username is ethanb on both KGS and DGS (kgs.kiseido.com, and www.dragongoserver.net).
I dunno what to tell you man - the programs you want all exist for free, but they're all for Linux. I don't think iptables is going to be ported to Windows anytime soon (since it's part of the Linux kernel).
The good news I have for you is that you can get the ISOs for Redhat 9 off of Bittorrent - it's not hard to install either:)
Yes, but it doesn't seem to be getting it right hence the problem requiring adaptive I/O scheduling. Certainly ext2 should automatically determine that, for example, our html web page read by Apache is sequential and the data should be read-ahead buffered. However, this doesn't seem to be helping.
You're misunderstanding the issue here. Linux does read-ahaead on long linear reads just fine. That's not the issue. The issue is primarily not a server issue, in fact. It's primarily a desktop/workstation issue.
There are often multiple processes on any machine wanting to do I/O simultaneously. Since the hard drive can only process one request at a time, the processes are competing for a limited resource (hard drive thoroughput). Thus, their access has to be scheduled properly to ensure the most efficient use of the hard drive.
The reason this is a big win is because of a system's apparent speed, or interactiveness. If you've ever been processing audio at a workstation and tried to open a calculator or an xterm or something like that while streaming media is being written to disk, you would know that it sometimes appears as if the computer has practically locked up, except for the sound of the hard drive. If reads can be pushed to the head of the queue, this helps immensely, for several reasons.
Interactive processes are dependent on reads, not writes. If a video game or audio processing application or 3d modeling program or web server or almost anything else needs to read data from the disk, it is almost always the case that no more work will be done by that program until it has the data it is looking for. If the read is being blocked by a large sequential write, then it will appear as though the reading process has locked up until the write is done and the read can be serviced.
Reads are often small and non-contiguous. In the case of a web server serving a page, it has to read the text of the page, then process additional requests for all of the graphic content included in the body of that page. If it's 2 am and your backup process is tarring up all the changed files in preparation to burning CDs or tape backup, you don't want the person viewing your site to have to wait an extraordinary amount of time for the backup to finish, do you?
There's a couple more examples I could give, but I'm sure you get the picture. This doesn't have anything to do with read-ahead. That works just fine:)
Has anybody plotted the galactic courses and traced them backward to where they converge? The center of the universe so to speak? Have we pointed a scope at it? I know it looks the same in every direction, but the convergence point has to be somewhere I've googled extensively and can't find an answer, just explanations of why every point "thinks" it's the center.
I think you need to go back and actually read those explanations.
The reason there is no center is because there is no way of getting an "absolute" velocity of every system. You need a frame of reference to find the velocities of each galaxy/planet/what have you. But what's the velocity of your current frame of reference? That would be zero, since your frame is moving along with your current galaxy/planet/whatever. Therefore every point you wish to measure the center of the universe from will BE the center of the universe.
I keep hearing good things about this Starship Exeter movie - I finally followed your link to check it out...
Good thing I looked at the script before wasting any bandwidth - there's a HUGE plot hole right smack in the middle of the first page.
Jennings:
That's right Quince, the Andorians have successfully synthesized a cure for the Canopus plague.... Ten hours ago the Lexington achieved orbit of Andoria and attempted to contact their Planetary Council... There was no reply... For the last four hours Star Fleet Command has tried to contact the Council over emergency channels.... All we have received is dead air.
Garrovick:
Could the Lexington beam down a landing party?
Jennings:
Impossible. That would risk infection of the entire Andorian population... which could result in a world-wide plague of immeasurable proportions.
Doesn't anybody else notice the problem with that?! If the Andorians have the cure for this disease, how is sending a landing party down to see them going to touch off a world-wide plague? That makes no sense whatsoever!
Hopes dashed once again... this is why I never read fanfic - it seems like a good idea, but really the writing should be left to the people who created the damn universe to begin with.
OK, I did some 3D imaging math about 10 years ago (when you had to code your own drivers to get SuperVGA mode under DOS), so I think I get what he's talking about: the problem of how to show the reflection of one object (or light source) off another object. I've never heard of "interpolated half-angle" or "specular highlights", or the "triangulation line". Anyone know what he is talking about?
You didn't get much beyond Gouraud shading, did you?:)
Of course, depending on your hardware ten years ago, specularity might not have been feaasible if you were doing something big and real-time. Certainly not with the standard PC of that era.
Specular highlights: the white (or colored, if a non-white light) spot you see reflected on a non-matte surface from an incoming light. If you've got a standard office-black telephone at your desk like I do right now, looking at the corner edge of the handset you should see a bit of yellowish or bluish white which is a reflection from the overhead lights. If you move your head (change the viewing angle) you can see it shift over the surface of the phone. This is a specular highlight. The strength of the highlight depends on the "Shininess" of the surface - the less shiny, the more diffuse, until you reach sheet-of-paper-matte, which has little to no visible highlight - only shading.
Triangulation line: Unfortunately, the state of 3d graphics not being ideal when compared to the telephone handset on your desk, the surface of that phone will be composed of triangles rather than molded plastic. Under the traditional Gouraud shading plus specular highlight model, to conserve computing resources the angle of the incoming light is only calculated at each vertex of each triangle on the surface of each object, and then the angle between it and the reflection toward the viewer is interpolated linearly along the edges of the polygon. Thus, when triangles get too large, instead of a nice highlight resembling the shape of the light source (usually spherical in computer graphics, regardless of the actual object the light is supposedly emanating from), you see a highlight along the lines making up the triangle, that quickly fades toward the outside edges. Very big ugly obvious rendering mistake.
Interpolated half-angle: you can probably figure out what this is based on my explanation of "triangulation line", but just in case -- this is the interpolated angle (actually interpolated cosine of two angles, which is why it's referred to here as a half-angle) used to figure out the strength of the highlight at any given fragment (new word for pixel) of the triangle being rendered.
I did it going from 7.3 to 8.0 -- after a while you're right, dist-upgrade bombs out with too many dependency conflicts.
what you have to do is read the list of things that would have been upgraded, and try to apt-get install a bunch of them... It may work, in which case repeat:)
If it comes back with dependency issues, then rpm -e the old software that's causing it to fail, then retry the apt-get install. The reason this works is because the old package name has been replaced with a different one and the package maintainers didn't label the upgrade path appropriately. It will grab the new version as a dependency for the install.
After enough repetitions of that, you'll have an upgraded system. Be prepared to spend an afternoon or so doing it.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish I had mod points right now - you're right on target.
Easily, I'd say:
1) Mozilla (http://mozilla.org)
2) Mplayer (http://mplayerhq.hu)
3) GIMP (http://gimp.org)
4) OpenOffice (http://openoffice.org)
5) Cinelerra (http://heroinewarrior.com/cinelerra.php3)
6) K3B (http://www.k3b.org)
Not knowing anything about Linux, I would recommend having a friend help you set up your computer and having him available once in a while to ask how to do stuff. You'll get the hang of the OS pretty quickly though. I got my friend up and running with Fedora Core 1 a couple of weeks ago, and he just installed the mouse gesture plugin for Mozilla by himself yesterday. I'm so proud. *sniff*
It seems like for every cool CCG Atlas comes out with, there's another one that people anticipate that gets cut before production.
:)
Anybody ever hear about the Amber CCG? I was really looking forward to that one. A year after it was supposed to have come out, I was still waiting for it... then I found out it had been cut.
Maybe they'll bring it to term though - here's hoping
I still drive an '88 Toyota Corolla that was purchased new. It has *never* had any major problems.
:)
The timing belt has been changed twice (once at 65K miles, once at 130K), tires and brake pads replaced every couple of years, battery replaced three or four times (mainly due to me accidentally leaving the headlights on too often), and the only bit of non-routine maintenance that I can recall is that the distributor cap needed to be replaced last year because it was cracked. It has started to chug a quart of oil a month, but I can live with that.
Toyotas are superbly engineered vehicles, built to withstand years of driving. I am very pleased with mine and I wouldn't consider buying any other brand to replace it when I start to think about it in another 20 years when flying cars become available.
Radiohead and DJ Shadow are one thing, but Sigur Ros has released the vast majority of their albums on non-RIAA labels. Just because they made a mistake once, we shouldn't continue to punish them for it. :)
Holy crap, Microsoft can find your physical mailing address if you download their source code...
Does that mean those people I laughed at in high school for circulating that thing about Bill Gates sending you $100 for forwarding this email were RIGHT?!
Damn, now I wish I'd been stupid enough to send that thing on - I could use an extra hundred bucks.
[nt]
----
Gnu Go is so very *not* 8k. When I was 10k on KGS I beat it by 20 points in an even game. Now I'm 9k on KGS (although slightly underrated) and I beat the most recent version by over 100 points the other day giving it 3 handicap stones.
It really falls apart in the middle game. It does things like trying to attack my stones but the strength I build up allows me to crush a weak group on the other side of where it was attacking me from. It needs a *lot* of work to understand the whole board. Maybe it would give me a decent game with 5 handicap stones. That would put it around 12k, if we assume I'm 2 stones underrated on KGS.
Cool, thanks. Maybe I'll dust off my copy of quake 3 sometime and check it out.
Technically, when the word "whither" was in style, sentence structure was a bit more confusing. Whither was really a replacement for "To what place..." with a couple of words generally being implied.
"Where are you going?" would often be spoken as "Whither going?", meaning "To what place [are you] going?"
"Whither Mountain Dew?" isn't so far of the bat as all that, as it would be taken to mean "Where is the Mountain Dew?" or "To what place [can be found / is] Mountain Dew?"
I went to their website because it sounded cool, but the only info I could find is that it's a mod for Q3A...
Well I already KNEW that. I want to know what the storyline is about! I read the FAQ and the "Background Information" portion of the manual. Apparently nothing on their website tells you anything at all about what the point of the game is.
Is it just Q3A with different weapons (in other words, pointless)? What the hell is it?
So we have Earth, Water, Wind and Fire???? What is the fifth
The fifth element is Heart, but it apparently only allows you to talk to animals. That kid Ma-ti got gypped when they handed out the rings, huh?
Also, having the president fall off of one - in public no less - is probably not the best publicity you could have.
Wait a sec... the President?!?! Are you talking about Bush? Do you have footage? Can you set up an FTP site or a torrent? That would be the best publicity EVER! I know after watching that (over and over and over), I'd be saving up my hard-earned for a Segway.
I always wondered: what the hell does that mean? Isn't a parsec a measure of distance, not time?
I believe Home of the Underdogs has it available for download. http://the-underdogs.org
You should attend a workshop taught by Yang Yilun. He's a 7-dan Chinese pro who teaches in the U.S. Usually the workshops run all weekend for about $200-250. He is an excellent teacher and has written several books, including one coming out soon from Slate and Shell.
The most impressive thing I've ever seen is at the one workshop I've been to by him. He took all of the students (eighteen), divided us up into pairs (so they can discuss moves with one another), and played us all simultaneously. Then after beating us all (even the pair composed of Keith Arnold, 5 dan and Eagles Song, 4 dan) we cleared off the boards, then he sat down with the first pair, replayed their game from memory, and commented on what they could have done better. Then he replayed the second game from memory... and kept going all the way around the circle.
He's got another workshop coming up in June, I believe. It's in New Jersey. I'm definitely making the trek.
Go was brought to the west via contact with Japan - that's why it's called "Go" here. The game is known as "Igo" in Japan, "Wei qi" in China, and "Paduk" in Korea. The technical terms used in the west are also all Japanese terms (most amateur go players in the US will know what "miai", "hane", "tengen", "joseki", and "aji" mean, for example), even though China and Korea have their own equivalents.
Evidence shows that go was originally brought to Japan via Buddhist monks from China though. Evidence of go in China predates written records, so it's not certain whether it originated there or was brought from elsewhere.
Before Tartrate got so famous (infamous?) amateur go players were keeping track of how many games they were away from having played Honinbo Shuusaku of the Edo period.
My Shuusaku number is 5 -- Shusaku (0) - Iwasaki Kenzo (1) - Honinbo Shusai (2) - Iwamoto Kaoru (3) - James Kerwin (4) - Ethan Baldridge (5).
One of the coolest games on the KGS archives is Tartrate vs. Redrose (Irina Shikshina, a Russian woman who is a 1st dan Korean professional). Tartrate was black and played his first move on tengen (the center of the board), which is an unusual opening. There were two ENORMOUS ko fights, and everybody thought Redrose had won after the first one was over. Check it out, it's a great game.
If anybody wants a Shuusaku number of 6 and/or a Tartrate number of 3, my username is ethanb on both KGS and DGS (kgs.kiseido.com, and www.dragongoserver.net).
Don't just assume everyone wants to buy the best of everything. (Why isn't Mercedes-Benz the largest car manufacturer in the world?)
I thought it was because their engineering sucks compared to Toyota... :)
I dunno what to tell you man - the programs you want all exist for free, but they're all for Linux. I don't think iptables is going to be ported to Windows anytime soon (since it's part of the Linux kernel).
:)
The good news I have for you is that you can get the ISOs for Redhat 9 off of Bittorrent - it's not hard to install either
Yes, but it doesn't seem to be getting it right hence the problem requiring adaptive I/O scheduling. Certainly ext2 should automatically determine that, for example, our html web page read by Apache is sequential and the data should be read-ahead buffered. However, this doesn't seem to be helping.
You're misunderstanding the issue here. Linux does read-ahaead on long linear reads just fine. That's not the issue. The issue is primarily not a server issue, in fact. It's primarily a desktop/workstation issue.
There are often multiple processes on any machine wanting to do I/O simultaneously. Since the hard drive can only process one request at a time, the processes are competing for a limited resource (hard drive thoroughput). Thus, their access has to be scheduled properly to ensure the most efficient use of the hard drive.
The reason this is a big win is because of a system's apparent speed, or interactiveness. If you've ever been processing audio at a workstation and tried to open a calculator or an xterm or something like that while streaming media is being written to disk, you would know that it sometimes appears as if the computer has practically locked up, except for the sound of the hard drive. If reads can be pushed to the head of the queue, this helps immensely, for several reasons.
There's a couple more examples I could give, but I'm sure you get the picture. This doesn't have anything to do with read-ahead. That works just fine :)
Has anybody plotted the galactic courses and traced them backward to where they converge? The center of the universe so to speak? Have we pointed a scope at it? I know it looks the same in every direction, but the convergence point has to be somewhere I've googled extensively and can't find an answer, just explanations of why every point "thinks" it's the center.
I think you need to go back and actually read those explanations.
The reason there is no center is because there is no way of getting an "absolute" velocity of every system. You need a frame of reference to find the velocities of each galaxy/planet/what have you. But what's the velocity of your current frame of reference? That would be zero, since your frame is moving along with your current galaxy/planet/whatever. Therefore every point you wish to measure the center of the universe from will BE the center of the universe.
I keep hearing good things about this Starship Exeter movie - I finally followed your link to check it out...
Good thing I looked at the script before wasting any bandwidth - there's a HUGE plot hole right smack in the middle of the first page.
Jennings:
That's right Quince, the Andorians have successfully synthesized a cure for the Canopus plague.... Ten hours ago the Lexington achieved orbit of Andoria and attempted to contact their Planetary Council... There was no reply... For the last four hours Star Fleet Command has tried to contact the Council over emergency channels.... All we have received is dead air.
Garrovick:
Could the Lexington beam down a landing party?
Jennings:
Impossible. That would risk infection of the entire Andorian population... which could result in a world-wide plague of immeasurable proportions.
Doesn't anybody else notice the problem with that?! If the Andorians have the cure for this disease, how is sending a landing party down to see them going to touch off a world-wide plague? That makes no sense whatsoever!
Hopes dashed once again... this is why I never read fanfic - it seems like a good idea, but really the writing should be left to the people who created the damn universe to begin with.
OK, I did some 3D imaging math about 10 years ago (when you had to code your own drivers to get SuperVGA mode under DOS), so I think I get what he's talking about: the problem of how to show the reflection of one object (or light source) off another object. I've never heard of "interpolated half-angle" or "specular highlights", or the "triangulation line". Anyone know what he is talking about?
You didn't get much beyond Gouraud shading, did you? :)
Of course, depending on your hardware ten years ago, specularity might not have been feaasible if you were doing something big and real-time. Certainly not with the standard PC of that era.
Hope that helps!
I did it going from 7.3 to 8.0 -- after a while you're right, dist-upgrade bombs out with too many dependency conflicts.
:)
what you have to do is read the list of things that would have been upgraded, and try to apt-get install a bunch of them... It may work, in which case repeat
If it comes back with dependency issues, then rpm -e the old software that's causing it to fail, then retry the apt-get install. The reason this works is because the old package name has been replaced with a different one and the package maintainers didn't label the upgrade path appropriately. It will grab the new version as a dependency for the install.
After enough repetitions of that, you'll have an upgraded system. Be prepared to spend an afternoon or so doing it.