Archon was one of the best games I had for my Atari 800. The idea was fairly simple (as is usually the case with good games): take a chess-style game, but require that the pieces fight when trying to take another piece. Different pieces had different weapons, abilities, and movement. Pieces had different power based on what color of square they were on (and some squares changed colors). You won by killing all of the oponents pieces or by taking five particular squares.
It's about $6/month with a basic FTP account, which includes 5 mailboxes. You can set up procmail filters, and there's a web interface for common filtering needs.
I once saw a piece of software called fscktv that would descramble scrambled analog cable signals if you had exactly the right chips in your video card (which I don't). However, most of the interesting content is moving over to digital cable. If you don't have digital cable at all, in theory, the cable company can install a filter that will block out those frequencies entirely. Even if they don't, many of the channels may be encrypted, and there are no reports of anyone cracking that encryption yet.
At first, I was thrown off by the idea of compressing something like pi, as it shouldn't compress. The answer is that they're storing ASCII decimal digits, which require less than 4 bits per number, instead of 8. So you should get at least a 50% compression ratio, which would be 850 million bytes. But it's actually 3.something bits of information per byte, so they're able to fit it on a CD. I would be surprised if bzip could do any better than that.
I remember a similar system that let you send faxes by email using the same concept. I seem to recall that it used the phone number backwards in DNS for the address or something like that. Or am I mixing two different systems.
Anyway, if anyone remembers what I'm talking about in more detail, please refresh my memory.
Just a guess, but if they never exposed the internals of the graphics hardware to the developers, and instead had them use libraries, then the libraries can be re-writen to use the new hardware. In other words, it's just like switching graphics cards on a PC--you replace the driver, and your software doesn't really care (expect for a change in performance).
I would also point out that what is important is whether the long-term population size is stable. If the per-person child rate is above 1 (after taking into account people who don't have children--it's an average, afterall), then the population will grow without bounds. If the mortality rate is really zero, then even with a child rate of less than one, you have an infinite series to add up, and it may go to infinity. If the child rate is 0.5, then the population will stabilize at double the current level (1 + 0.5 + 0.25 +... = 2). That's probably the best you could hope for with a near-zero mortality rate.
First, your numbers are off. That's closer to the number of eggs that are released during a typical lifespan, not the total number in the ovaries.
Second, I believe that there is some recent research to suggest that, just like with nerve cells, the idea that the body doesn't produce any new ones after birth is incorrect. It's just a very slow or infrequent process, so it doesn't normally get observed.
If we could stop aging, imagine the population boom. Especially imagine the families that like to have lots of children, when women never go past childbearing age (whether preference or religious belief, they would have huge families).
So any cure for aging would need to also include a limit on reproduction. Perhaps the treatment would, by law, include sterilization. And perhaps the treatment would be denied to anyone with more than a certain number of children.
When you're in an environment where you have to develop software for hardware that is also being developed internally, the problem gets much worse. You have to deal with the fact that the hardware you're developing on is pre-production hardware that is almost certain to be different from the shipping hardware.
There's not really too much to be done about it. We don't want to have the code check to see which hardware it's on, as that would make it easier to have more bugs. In some ways, this can be good, as dealing with buggy hardware is very similar to dealing with failing hardware, and we need to have robust code that can detect and handle hardware failures gracefully.
In fact, sometimes it is best to have different development and testing environments, as the differences will sometimes help obscure bugs to show up more easily on one platform so that they can be fixed earlier.
Doesn't the CableCard have to be integrated with the decoder? It has to be able to receive signals from the cable company just like a set top box converter. I doubt they'll let you get one that exposes the keys to let you decrypt in software.
So I don't see any likelihood that you'll be able to decrypt encrypted QAM in the future using current hardware unless the ecryption in cracked.
Apparently there is a company using extra bandwidth in ATSC broadcasts to carry encrypted pay channels.
Many digital cable channels are sent in encrypted QAM.
With the former, I'm pretty sure that cards like the HD-3000 will happily record the datastream, but will leave it encrypted. I expect that you'll find the same with a card that will record unencrypted QAM streams. You'll be able to record encrypted signals, but you'll have to decrypt them in software.
Now the question is, how hard is it to decrypt those streams? Is there a decent chance of cracking the keys in software, or is a cable card the only hope?
Why do these cheat codes exist in the final product? I can understand having them for development--they need to be able to test different parts of the game. Buy why would they still exist in the released version?
This looks like a new method of brute force. However, it would be easy for the game to detect it and disable all cheat codes--all they would have to do is have a bunch of extra special codes that instead of giving you more power, silently disable cheat codes.
Re:The stories seem to contradict each other
on
A New Kind of Chemistry
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Not necessarily a contradiction.
Hydrogen reacts with lots of things, but it's very stable in the sense that it continues to be hydrogen. These clusters may be reactive, but are very stable in the sense that the clusters remain intact with all the same properties of the cluster.
Or at least that's my understanding of what they're trying to say, having not read the article.
The key feature for an MP3 player in my mind is the ability to integrate with existing audio systems. The iPod is getting there--some cars are now designed to use one. The next step is a (cheap) stereo component that you can plug an iPod into.
While I tend to agree with you--I have never used a protable MP3 player--obviously, many people do. As evidence, look at the iPod sales. Sure, many of us don't have a use for them, but for anyone who wants a portable music device, they're usually the best option.
They're not USB, so I'm not sure how you would hook it up to a Mac. I suppose if you had a USB serial adapter, with some clever driver hacking, it would likely work.
Yup, I'm running MythTV, it's no different to play back downloaded shows than recorded shows.
And since I have a 16:9 TV, I actually get to use the full screen. I probably could zoom in with the US broadcast, but I doubt I'll ever be able to get the quality of image from the UK downloads.
The Open Group was formed by the merger of X/Open and the Open Software Foundation. The use of "open" in all those names predates the phrase "open source." The term it relates to is "open systems," which refers to standardized Unix systems, as opposed to mainframes.
Obviously you would limit the auto-registration to some small number. If spammers start to send out dummy mail to trigger registrations, just wait until you've received enough spam with the same domain from separate honeypot email accounts.
Some anti-spam group should set up a spam filter that looks for domain names, and registers any that it sees that aren't valid. They would point to a web site that politely explains to users how stupid they are for clicking on a link in spam.
I expect spammers would drop that technique quite quickly if that were done.
So the mammal died, and the dinosaur was feeding on it, but died while inside it. Or it crawled inside the carcass after some other predator had fed on it, possibly simply for warmth (explaining it if it were a vegetarian).
Granted, the first interpretation is probably correct, but they need to have reasons for rejecting the alternatives.
Personally, I like the LEGO trains, which are almost O-gauge.
But to the topic on hand, it seems to me that our reaction indicates that product hasn't been successfully marketed, or we wouldn't have had that reaction.
Slashdot Mirror
Archon was one of the best games I had for my Atari 800. The idea was fairly simple (as is usually the case with good games): take a chess-style game, but require that the pieces fight when trying to take another piece. Different pieces had different weapons, abilities, and movement. Pieces had different power based on what color of square they were on (and some squares changed colors). You won by killing all of the oponents pieces or by taking five particular squares.
I've been happy with pair.com for my hosting.
It's about $6/month with a basic FTP account, which includes 5 mailboxes. You can set up procmail filters, and there's a web interface for common filtering needs.
I once saw a piece of software called fscktv that would descramble scrambled analog cable signals if you had exactly the right chips in your video card (which I don't). However, most of the interesting content is moving over to digital cable. If you don't have digital cable at all, in theory, the cable company can install a filter that will block out those frequencies entirely. Even if they don't, many of the channels may be encrypted, and there are no reports of anyone cracking that encryption yet.
At first, I was thrown off by the idea of compressing something like pi, as it shouldn't compress. The answer is that they're storing ASCII decimal digits, which require less than 4 bits per number, instead of 8. So you should get at least a 50% compression ratio, which would be 850 million bytes. But it's actually 3.something bits of information per byte, so they're able to fit it on a CD. I would be surprised if bzip could do any better than that.
I remember a similar system that let you send faxes by email using the same concept. I seem to recall that it used the phone number backwards in DNS for the address or something like that. Or am I mixing two different systems.
Anyway, if anyone remembers what I'm talking about in more detail, please refresh my memory.
Just a guess, but if they never exposed the internals of the graphics hardware to the developers, and instead had them use libraries, then the libraries can be re-writen to use the new hardware. In other words, it's just like switching graphics cards on a PC--you replace the driver, and your software doesn't really care (expect for a change in performance).
I would also point out that what is important is whether the long-term population size is stable. If the per-person child rate is above 1 (after taking into account people who don't have children--it's an average, afterall), then the population will grow without bounds. If the mortality rate is really zero, then even with a child rate of less than one, you have an infinite series to add up, and it may go to infinity. If the child rate is 0.5, then the population will stabilize at double the current level (1 + 0.5 + 0.25 + ... = 2). That's probably the best you could hope for with a near-zero mortality rate.
First, your numbers are off. That's closer to the number of eggs that are released during a typical lifespan, not the total number in the ovaries.
Second, I believe that there is some recent research to suggest that, just like with nerve cells, the idea that the body doesn't produce any new ones after birth is incorrect. It's just a very slow or infrequent process, so it doesn't normally get observed.
If we could stop aging, imagine the population boom. Especially imagine the families that like to have lots of children, when women never go past childbearing age (whether preference or religious belief, they would have huge families).
So any cure for aging would need to also include a limit on reproduction. Perhaps the treatment would, by law, include sterilization. And perhaps the treatment would be denied to anyone with more than a certain number of children.
When you're in an environment where you have to develop software for hardware that is also being developed internally, the problem gets much worse. You have to deal with the fact that the hardware you're developing on is pre-production hardware that is almost certain to be different from the shipping hardware.
There's not really too much to be done about it. We don't want to have the code check to see which hardware it's on, as that would make it easier to have more bugs. In some ways, this can be good, as dealing with buggy hardware is very similar to dealing with failing hardware, and we need to have robust code that can detect and handle hardware failures gracefully.
In fact, sometimes it is best to have different development and testing environments, as the differences will sometimes help obscure bugs to show up more easily on one platform so that they can be fixed earlier.
Doesn't the CableCard have to be integrated with the decoder? It has to be able to receive signals from the cable company just like a set top box converter. I doubt they'll let you get one that exposes the keys to let you decrypt in software.
So I don't see any likelihood that you'll be able to decrypt encrypted QAM in the future using current hardware unless the ecryption in cracked.
Apparently there is a company using extra bandwidth in ATSC broadcasts to carry encrypted pay channels.
Many digital cable channels are sent in encrypted QAM.
With the former, I'm pretty sure that cards like the HD-3000 will happily record the datastream, but will leave it encrypted. I expect that you'll find the same with a card that will record unencrypted QAM streams. You'll be able to record encrypted signals, but you'll have to decrypt them in software.
Now the question is, how hard is it to decrypt those streams? Is there a decent chance of cracking the keys in software, or is a cable card the only hope?
Why do these cheat codes exist in the final product? I can understand having them for development--they need to be able to test different parts of the game. Buy why would they still exist in the released version?
There are several ways to acquire cheat codes:
* Leak from an insider
* Lucky guess or brute force
* Analysis of the code
This looks like a new method of brute force. However, it would be easy for the game to detect it and disable all cheat codes--all they would have to do is have a bunch of extra special codes that instead of giving you more power, silently disable cheat codes.
Not necessarily a contradiction.
Hydrogen reacts with lots of things, but it's very stable in the sense that it continues to be hydrogen. These clusters may be reactive, but are very stable in the sense that the clusters remain intact with all the same properties of the cluster.
Or at least that's my understanding of what they're trying to say, having not read the article.
The key feature for an MP3 player in my mind is the ability to integrate with existing audio systems. The iPod is getting there--some cars are now designed to use one. The next step is a (cheap) stereo component that you can plug an iPod into.
While I tend to agree with you--I have never used a protable MP3 player--obviously, many people do. As evidence, look at the iPod sales. Sure, many of us don't have a use for them, but for anyone who wants a portable music device, they're usually the best option.
They're not USB, so I'm not sure how you would hook it up to a Mac. I suppose if you had a USB serial adapter, with some clever driver hacking, it would likely work.
Yup, I'm running MythTV, it's no different to play back downloaded shows than recorded shows.
And since I have a 16:9 TV, I actually get to use the full screen. I probably could zoom in with the US broadcast, but I doubt I'll ever be able to get the quality of image from the UK downloads.
The Open Group was formed by the merger of X/Open and the Open Software Foundation. The use of "open" in all those names predates the phrase "open source." The term it relates to is "open systems," which refers to standardized Unix systems, as opposed to mainframes.
Obviously you would limit the auto-registration to some small number. If spammers start to send out dummy mail to trigger registrations, just wait until you've received enough spam with the same domain from separate honeypot email accounts.
The cost of the registrations could possbily worked out with a deal with one of the registrars.
I would love to see the reaction the spammer has the first time he tries that trick and finds that someone else beat him to the domain registration.
It would also provide some interesting data on the click-through and image-view rates for spam.
Some anti-spam group should set up a spam filter that looks for domain names, and registers any that it sees that aren't valid. They would point to a web site that politely explains to users how stupid they are for clicking on a link in spam.
I expect spammers would drop that technique quite quickly if that were done.
So the mammal died, and the dinosaur was feeding on it, but died while inside it. Or it crawled inside the carcass after some other predator had fed on it, possibly simply for warmth (explaining it if it were a vegetarian).
Granted, the first interpretation is probably correct, but they need to have reasons for rejecting the alternatives.
Yup, that was my reaction to the headline.
Personally, I like the LEGO trains, which are almost O-gauge.
But to the topic on hand, it seems to me that our reaction indicates that product hasn't been successfully marketed, or we wouldn't have had that reaction.