I don't see why the Jetta wouldn't be considered a nice family car though, I'd rather have one of those than either a Passat or a Camry. That sounds a bit strange, as the Jetta is basically a low-budget version of the Passat. They share most of the mechanical parts, the Passat just has more luxury and other options, and it looks a lot better. So If money is not the issue you would be pretty stupid to prefer the Jetta.
not really, I use virus to apply to all malware(except spyware) that you can get. when you are talking about spreading a virus via email, you are almost universally(now adays) talking about a trojan, but that is irrelevant to whether or not the population of users outside of windows is ever high enough to allow such a virus/trojan to spread. Then you show me a trojan for OSX that can hose my system without specifically asking for a password, which normally only happens when I want to install system software (which is about once every few months or so, when a security update is released). Then compare that to the ease-of-infection on an XP system, or a Vista system that has UAC disabled because it annoys the hell out of people.
You really should try to make a distinction between trojans and virsuses, you know. I can write an almost 100% fail-safe linux trojan in about 2 seconds:
#!/bin/sh sudo rm -rf /
Does that mean linux is just as unsafe as Windows? I don't think so, because no user in his/her right mind would consider typing in their user password for some obscure binary or shell script they from an unknown source. That's completely different from the windows world, in XP clicking a link in your MSN client can be enough, clicking an email attachment, whatever, because so many people run with admin privileges. So XP and everything before that can be considered unsafe just because of the fact that using it on a day-to-day basis means running as admin for 99% of people. For Vista things are a little harder, but since it asks for your password so often, people get lazy and just fall back to their Windows-conditioned 'ok, ok, ok' habits.
I am a big KDE proponent, but no one does backwards compat like MS. Which is exactly one of the reasons Windows will never be able to make a fresh start with clean code anymore. Where other OS's just upgrade the apps (recompile), run old software through an emulator (OS X) or just deprecate old apps and supersede them with new ones, MS chose to go from a glorified 16-bit shell around dos, to a mixed 16/32-bit glorified shell around DOS, to a 32-bit OS that could still run 16-bit apps natively, to Windows Vista, which is basically just XP + a lot of bloat and intrusive under-the-hood stuff no end-user asked for. Add to that the necessity to keep supporting the monstrosity that is the original Win32 API, and you might get the point. Backwards compatibility is nice, but somewhere it has to stop. If BC is your single most important feature, just stick with the OS you're already using.
The need for BC is a lot less for other OS's BTW, because they have better forward compatibility. IE: you can run most linux binaries on older systems, provided they where either linked statically or provide their dynamic libraries. Same goes for OS X, you can still run every OS X app on the net on Leopard, but most of them still also work fine on Tiger.
Yes, it sucks that some few thousand people get shot to death in America every year, but, when you weigh that against the notion of some 80 million Americans (if not more), actually owning a gun, then, you can see that gunowership itself is safer than walking down the stairs or going for a swim. Well, I beg to disagree with that, I don't see the added value of armed citizens. But let's just keep it at that, we're not going to agree on this one.
And, its stupid too, because, everyone in America knows that these troops really aren't allowed to fight, and that, what all these troops are just tokens to try and deceive the American people into thinking that NATO actually means something. I think we should take reality for what it is. Europe isn't going to fight for anything, and that, while, we should remain firm friends and have good and open trade, that NATO should be dissolved, except for a military alliance with the British, and let the Europeans fend for themselves. In fact, these troops *are* allowed to fight, but we're all just supposed not to see it like that. Our government likes to call it a 'reconstructive mission, to re-build the country', but it's nothing more than troops scouting an area that's not even 2% of the country, of which only 3sqr kilomtres is actually safe and under control, constantly driving into ambushes and roadside bombs. No official numbers are available, but it's estimated that dutch troops already killed hundreds of Taliban. Don't let anyone fool you: this *is* a fighting mission, just a useless one.
Also let me remind you of the war in Yuguslavia and Albania to stop genocide. NATO does mean something, sometimes.
Seemed to work pretty well in 1776, but then again, the Netherlands is generally cannon fodder for other European powers. Maybe you should try an armed citizenry sometimes So what you're basically saying is that things haven't changed much in the US since 1776, and that's why you all still need to have guns? And did you ever care to check how many citizens the Netherlands has? Even if every person in the country was armed to the teeth we would be overrun easily by all of the countries around us except Belgium and Luxembourg.
I do agree that we are cannon fodder for about any country on earth, both in the military and political sense. That's why our government is sucking up to the US so much providing military support in Afghanistan and Iraq. We actually have 1600 people in Afghanistan that will be there at least until 2010, defending 3 square kilometres of bare desert. That's more than e.g. France or Germany. We're not there because anyone actually thinks it will make a difference, but only to please the US and get something in return later.
We despise our politicians, becuase, we can. We despise our system, because we can. We in America are always searching for better, in our goods and in ourselves and above all, in our leaders. Then you should try searching a little harder, because somehow you seem to keep voting absolute idiots into the white house and senate. The history of the US is riddled with presidents that were obviously not elected for their capabilities and good intentions for the US and its people. Clinton was not bad, but instead of praising him you almost impeached him, for getting a blowjob from his secretary. In my book that's hardly as bad for a country as taking money from large corporations in exchange for political favors. Anyway, I don't think I can remember any other good US president that was in the office during my lifetime. Don't even get me started on the abundance of right-winged hardline morons in the senate, that normally only get there by elbowing themselves up, having a big mouth and being completely disconnected from reality.
Anyway, it's not like the US is unique in this regard, where I live (Netherlands) we have a prime minister that already trainwrecked three cabinets and he's well on his way to wreck his 4th.
Our system provides for more checks and balances than any parliamentry system, simply by virtue of having the executive branch be genuinely separate from that of the legislative. Finally, as a practical matter, our system is the only system that exists genuinly by the consent of its governed. The vast majority of Americans own a gun of some kind, and to own a gun is to have -real- power, far more than even our mighty military has. The 'guns empower the people' argument is pretty pitiful, but I guess that's just something you can only see if you're not raised with stupid idea's like that. How do you envisage the american people to defend or correct their politcal system using guns? By shooting all representatives that don't agree. Thinking guns protect your civil rights is outright insane.
As for the checks and balances in your government: I think there's a lot going on in the US that proves there aren't enough, or they are too easily circumvented.
As it is, no operating system has ever run faster than it's predecessor on the same hardware. Well I don't really see OS X Leopard running any slower than Tiger on my old iBook G4, and that's a 3-year old machine by now. In some areas it even feels faster, but it's hard to tell if it actually is. Also, I remember going from linux kernel 2.4 to 2.6 and seeing a massive improvement in responsiveness.
So whilst your argument might be true for Windows and some other OS's, it's definitely not true for all.
If you have admin access, the battle's already lost. What's the point of running a complex process to obtain their password when you have full access to everything on their computer? Might as well just drop in a keylogger and get the same info much easier.
Most of the other ways to get to the passwords would leave a detectable trace, especially keyloggers. Or they need a reboot. If you're really after the user passwords, resetting them to something else is also not an option. AFAIK there is no other *easy* way to get a user's password from a locally exploitable Windows box, especially not if you cannot reboot it without being detected.
So in some cases, where a hacker with local access to a Windows box wants to have a user password without leaving a trace, an attack like this would be interesting.
I admit It's all a bit hypothetical... Still, it's not very nice to have a possible security hole like this and not patching it.
.. they'd better also do something about the terrible noise the 360 is producing. There is no way I would use my 360 as an HTPC as long as it produces so much noise. I can live with it when playing games, but when watching a movie I want the silent scenes to be just that: silent.
It's relatively trivial to have a bot that can try different techniques depending on who it's playing against, and learn what works and doesn't. No it isn't. You think it's easy, but the fact that no-one has ever before created a poker-playing bot that does better than even mediocre human players disproves this.
Creating a bot that defeats weak players is trivial, ie: players that have no sense of the odds they will hit something and make decisions that you can prove to be wrong based on the mathematics of the cards. A computer could calculate perfect odds and only play on them. However, such a bot would lose agains even a mediocre player that uses deception in his hands, plays bluffs, and watches the computers betting patterns. It's not hard to spot mathematical play.
Creating a bot that plays like a poker pro would require a combination of programmed intelligence, mathematics, player statistics, and second-order logic. There is no 'algorithm' that plays good poker yet, that I know of. It's not trivial.
Re:Artificial Intelligence?
on
Cracking Go
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· Score: 1
Wow, I don't think you really have any idea of what "Artificial Intelligence" means. For that matter, why did you capitalize it--the study of artificial intelligence involves many areas from mathematics, to computer science, to biology, neuroscience, etc--it's not some mystical... I don't know what, but whatever you seem to think it is! AI involves a lot of search questions, but an algorithm that performs an exhaustive search to find its next move is *not* artificial intelligence. You're turning things around. You can define the 'study of artificial intelligence' any way you like, but finding the best answer by comparing all alternatives is not what I call 'intelligence', so having a computer do exactly that is not what I call 'artificial intelligence'. It does not resemble human intelligence in any way.
Also I think I do know pretty well what's involved in AI, having followed AI courses, courses on cognitive algorithms and courses on intelligent agents as part of my CS degree. Solving a game like chess or Go the way it's done right now is not 'artificial intelligence', and I think the majority of AI researchers agree with me on that point. Chess programs *do not do an exhaustive search of all possible moves*. If that where true, a chess program would *never* lose, only draw against really, really good human players. A chess computer combines statistical data from a game database with a bounded search on the utility of the possible game states it considers. It's just statistical processing + Markov chains.
In short, I disagree with everything you said in your post, every word:) That's fine by me, You can call stuff whatever you like. But please don't tell me I don't know whay I'm talking about, because I think I do.
Artificial Intelligence?
on
Cracking Go
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· Score: 1
"IEEE Spectrum looks at current trends in artificial technology to crack the ancient Chinese game of Go, which theoretically has 10^60 potential endings. Is conquering the game via exhaustive search of all possibilities possible?" Even if it where possible to conquer the game via an exhaustive search of all possibilities, it would still be nowhere near Artificial Intelligence. Besides that, other board games-playing computer programs do not get their strength from an exhaustive search, but from a large database of previous games. In fact, even world champions of chess do not think ahead more than 5 or 6 turns.
Wake me up when they come up with a computer program that can beat all human Go players without an exhaustive search...
Drugs are bad, because they cause physiological (chemical) dependence -- not because they cause you to sense something, that's not there (like movies).
Not all drugs cause physiological dependence. Especially not mushrooms. Drugs can be bad because some of them might cause physiological dependence. So you have to be careful with them. That said, religion can have some very nasty side-effects as well.
Condemn him as much as you want, but If you'd actually take the time to read the Qu'ran, you'd find out that he is right. I don't want to start a discussion on Catholics or religion in general, because it is my personal belief that *any* religion is based on bullshit and stems from peoples fears and failures to manage their own misery, and I know in advance that it is no use arguing with religious people about this. But of all religions I know, the Islam is without any doubt the one that spreads and provokes the most hatred. The main cause for this is the Qu'ran and the fact that Muslims can only interpret it literally.
That's old SLI (3Dfx era). When nVidia brought SLI back they redefined the acronym as "scalable link interface".
You're right. I've was still assuming SLI and Crossfire still did it like this, so I guess I should read up on my acronyms and 3D accelerator knowledge a little;-).
Ray tracing is actually more efficient. With the scene in a proper data structure, ray tracing can be O(log n) for a scene with n objects. Raster graphics is almost always O(n)
With n being what? The number of polygons? The number of pixels? The number of lightsources? Refractions? I've seen people make these complexity statements before, but I'm not sure if you can apply them to typical 3D scenes in general. I would be surprised if, when raytracing, processing time per pixel is linear in the number of refractions so that would already make the 'ray tracing can be O(log n)' a red herring.
SLI and Crossfire are parallel at the frame level and not at the pixel level.
Not quite. SLI is parallel on the scanline-level (that's why it's called "scanline interleaving", remember?). Internally, GPU's themselves are highly parallel architectures by nature. One can think of tens of different ways to distribute rendering operations over parallel hardware, many of which are actually used by modern GPU's.
they speculate that within two years the hardware will exist on the desktop to make 'game quality' raytracing graphics a reality."
I don't think so. Within 2 years GPU power will have increased a lot as well, and polygonal rendering already approaches raytracing quality right now, with anisotropic filtering/antialiasing, very high polygon counts, very high-res textures with programmable shading techniques, etc. Stuff like photorealistic shadows, glass effects, refraction etc, its all very nice, but for fast-moving scenes good approximations work equally well as photorealistic raytracing. Another issue is with games that actually *want* to render visuals that are not photorealistic. I can imagine simulating surrealistic visuals using a raytracer is even harder than simulating photorealistic visuals using polygonal rendering. Not to mention effects like smoke/fire/light emitting particles etc, that are very difficult to raytrace efficiently because they appear like they do in real life because of diffuse light, dispersion, etc.
Other problems I see with raytraced games are the exponential increase of processing with higher resolutions or higher light source counts, the fact that poor raytracing actually looks worse on higher resolutions, the increased production and programming costs and the fact that graphics companies will not like seeing the investments made in their current GPU architectures melt away.
And why exactly would it be impossible to get the key if it's stored in hardware then? It might be impossible without a modchip, and it might be impossible with some kind of other software exploit to get to the hardware, but it's most definitely 'impossible' at all. The xbox 360 uses a similar encryption/signing mechanism (per-box key stored in the CPU, signed and encrypted kernel and savegames), and people have already found ways to get to it. Either through an exploitable kernel that enables booting linux (if you never updated your console) or through a timing attack on the boot sequence (using hardware modifications). After you have the CPU key the whole security system more or less falls apart, because it allows downgrading the kernel, and (afaik, but I'm not 100% sure) hacking/encrypting/signing modified kernels.
So although the security implemented in these savegames is definitely about as good as it gets for now, it is definitely not impossible to break.
Macintosh computers are not game machines, period. The same can be said of low-end PC's/notebooks/older PC's etc. They don't run the latest games well either. Fortunately not everyone cares about games.
As for the 'no software' argument: it's just not true. You may not find boxed software for the Mac in every store, but seriously, who cares? You can order the software online, download and activate it, use free alternatives, whatever. I never walk into the store to buy Windows software either, online distribution is much more convenient anyway. For my specific purposes (which are pretty wide, from productivity, to programming, to unix server tasks, to typical end-user purposes, etc), I've not encountered a *single* task for which I could not find decent Mac software. Actually, most Mac equivalents of Windows programs are much better most of the time, especially shareware and free software.
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Ok, fair enough. Now where can I get a portable phonograph that fits in my pockets and holds 50+ albums?
Try carrying a 8-drive raid array with you when you're travelling.
when you are talking about spreading a virus via email, you are almost universally(now adays) talking about a trojan, but that is irrelevant to whether or not the population of users outside of windows is ever high enough to allow such a virus/trojan to spread. Then you show me a trojan for OSX that can hose my system without specifically asking for a password, which normally only happens when I want to install system software (which is about once every few months or so, when a security update is released). Then compare that to the ease-of-infection on an XP system, or a Vista system that has UAC disabled because it annoys the hell out of people.
You really should try to make a distinction between trojans and virsuses, you know. I can write an almost 100% fail-safe linux trojan in about 2 seconds:
#!/bin/sh
sudo rm -rf /
Does that mean linux is just as unsafe as Windows? I don't think so, because no user in his/her right mind would consider typing in their user password for some obscure binary or shell script they from an unknown source. That's completely different from the windows world, in XP clicking a link in your MSN client can be enough, clicking an email attachment, whatever, because so many people run with admin privileges. So XP and everything before that can be considered unsafe just because of the fact that using it on a day-to-day basis means running as admin for 99% of people. For Vista things are a little harder, but since it asks for your password so often, people get lazy and just fall back to their Windows-conditioned 'ok, ok, ok' habits.
You have never used Leopard did you? Go copy-paste your MS astroturfing somewhere else if you don't know what you're talking about.
The need for BC is a lot less for other OS's BTW, because they have better forward compatibility. IE: you can run most linux binaries on older systems, provided they where either linked statically or provide their dynamic libraries. Same goes for OS X, you can still run every OS X app on the net on Leopard, but most of them still also work fine on Tiger.
Also let me remind you of the war in Yuguslavia and Albania to stop genocide. NATO does mean something, sometimes.
I do agree that we are cannon fodder for about any country on earth, both in the military and political sense. That's why our government is sucking up to the US so much providing military support in Afghanistan and Iraq. We actually have 1600 people in Afghanistan that will be there at least until 2010, defending 3 square kilometres of bare desert. That's more than e.g. France or Germany. We're not there because anyone actually thinks it will make a difference, but only to please the US and get something in return later.
Anyway, it's not like the US is unique in this regard, where I live (Netherlands) we have a prime minister that already trainwrecked three cabinets and he's well on his way to wreck his 4th. Our system provides for more checks and balances than any parliamentry system, simply by virtue of having the executive branch be genuinely separate from that of the legislative. Finally, as a practical matter, our system is the only system that exists genuinly by the consent of its governed. The vast majority of Americans own a gun of some kind, and to own a gun is to have -real- power, far more than even our mighty military has. The 'guns empower the people' argument is pretty pitiful, but I guess that's just something you can only see if you're not raised with stupid idea's like that. How do you envisage the american people to defend or correct their politcal system using guns? By shooting all representatives that don't agree. Thinking guns protect your civil rights is outright insane.
As for the checks and balances in your government: I think there's a lot going on in the US that proves there aren't enough, or they are too easily circumvented.
So whilst your argument might be true for Windows and some other OS's, it's definitely not true for all.
quote first paragraph of my previous comment, unquote. I should use the preview option more often.
If you have admin access, the battle's already lost. What's the point of running a complex process to obtain their password when you have full access to everything on their computer? Might as well just drop in a keylogger and get the same info much easier.
Most of the other ways to get to the passwords would leave a detectable trace, especially keyloggers. Or they need a reboot. If you're really after the user passwords, resetting them to something else is also not an option. AFAIK there is no other *easy* way to get a user's password from a locally exploitable Windows box, especially not if you cannot reboot it without being detected.
So in some cases, where a hacker with local access to a Windows box wants to have a user password without leaving a trace, an attack like this would be interesting.
I admit It's all a bit hypothetical... Still, it's not very nice to have a possible security hole like this and not patching it.
.. they'd better also do something about the terrible noise the 360 is producing. There is no way I would use my 360 as an HTPC as long as it produces so much noise. I can live with it when playing games, but when watching a movie I want the silent scenes to be just that: silent.
Creating a bot that defeats weak players is trivial, ie: players that have no sense of the odds they will hit something and make decisions that you can prove to be wrong based on the mathematics of the cards. A computer could calculate perfect odds and only play on them. However, such a bot would lose agains even a mediocre player that uses deception in his hands, plays bluffs, and watches the computers betting patterns. It's not hard to spot mathematical play.
Creating a bot that plays like a poker pro would require a combination of programmed intelligence, mathematics, player statistics, and second-order logic. There is no 'algorithm' that plays good poker yet, that I know of. It's not trivial.
Also I think I do know pretty well what's involved in AI, having followed AI courses, courses on cognitive algorithms and courses on intelligent agents as part of my CS degree. Solving a game like chess or Go the way it's done right now is not 'artificial intelligence', and I think the majority of AI researchers agree with me on that point. Chess programs *do not do an exhaustive search of all possible moves*. If that where true, a chess program would *never* lose, only draw against really, really good human players. A chess computer combines statistical data from a game database with a bounded search on the utility of the possible game states it considers. It's just statistical processing + Markov chains. In short, I disagree with everything you said in your post, every word
Wake me up when they come up with a computer program that can beat all human Go players without an exhaustive search...
Drugs are bad, because they cause physiological (chemical) dependence -- not because they cause you to sense something, that's not there (like movies).
Not all drugs cause physiological dependence. Especially not mushrooms. Drugs can be bad because some of them might cause physiological dependence. So you have to be careful with them. That said, religion can have some very nasty side-effects as well.
Condemn him as much as you want, but If you'd actually take the time to read the Qu'ran, you'd find out that he is right. I don't want to start a discussion on Catholics or religion in general, because it is my personal belief that *any* religion is based on bullshit and stems from peoples fears and failures to manage their own misery, and I know in advance that it is no use arguing with religious people about this. But of all religions I know, the Islam is without any doubt the one that spreads and provokes the most hatred. The main cause for this is the Qu'ran and the fact that Muslims can only interpret it literally.
That's old SLI (3Dfx era). When nVidia brought SLI back they redefined the acronym as "scalable link interface".
;-).
You're right. I've was still assuming SLI and Crossfire still did it like this, so I guess I should read up on my acronyms and 3D accelerator knowledge a little
Ray tracing is actually more efficient. With the scene in a proper data structure, ray tracing can be O(log n) for a scene with n objects. Raster graphics is almost always O(n)
With n being what? The number of polygons? The number of pixels? The number of lightsources? Refractions? I've seen people make these complexity statements before, but I'm not sure if you can apply them to typical 3D scenes in general. I would be surprised if, when raytracing, processing time per pixel is linear in the number of refractions so that would already make the 'ray tracing can be O(log n)' a red herring.
SLI and Crossfire are parallel at the frame level and not at the pixel level.
Not quite. SLI is parallel on the scanline-level (that's why it's called "scanline interleaving", remember?). Internally, GPU's themselves are highly parallel architectures by nature. One can think of tens of different ways to distribute rendering operations over parallel hardware, many of which are actually used by modern GPU's.
they speculate that within two years the hardware will exist on the desktop to make 'game quality' raytracing graphics a reality."
I don't think so. Within 2 years GPU power will have increased a lot as well, and polygonal rendering already approaches raytracing quality right now, with anisotropic filtering/antialiasing, very high polygon counts, very high-res textures with programmable shading techniques, etc. Stuff like photorealistic shadows, glass effects, refraction etc, its all very nice, but for fast-moving scenes good approximations work equally well as photorealistic raytracing. Another issue is with games that actually *want* to render visuals that are not photorealistic. I can imagine simulating surrealistic visuals using a raytracer is even harder than simulating photorealistic visuals using polygonal rendering. Not to mention effects like smoke/fire/light emitting particles etc, that are very difficult to raytrace efficiently because they appear like they do in real life because of diffuse light, dispersion, etc.
Other problems I see with raytraced games are the exponential increase of processing with higher resolutions or higher light source counts, the fact that poor raytracing actually looks worse on higher resolutions, the increased production and programming costs and the fact that graphics companies will not like seeing the investments made in their current GPU architectures melt away.
"but it's most definitely 'impossible' at all" should be "most definitely not impossible at all" ofcourse, my bad...
And why exactly would it be impossible to get the key if it's stored in hardware then? It might be impossible without a modchip, and it might be impossible with some kind of other software exploit to get to the hardware, but it's most definitely 'impossible' at all. The xbox 360 uses a similar encryption/signing mechanism (per-box key stored in the CPU, signed and encrypted kernel and savegames), and people have already found ways to get to it. Either through an exploitable kernel that enables booting linux (if you never updated your console) or through a timing attack on the boot sequence (using hardware modifications). After you have the CPU key the whole security system more or less falls apart, because it allows downgrading the kernel, and (afaik, but I'm not 100% sure) hacking/encrypting/signing modified kernels.
So although the security implemented in these savegames is definitely about as good as it gets for now, it is definitely not impossible to break.
Macintosh computers are not game machines, period. The same can be said of low-end PC's/notebooks/older PC's etc. They don't run the latest games well either. Fortunately not everyone cares about games.
As for the 'no software' argument: it's just not true. You may not find boxed software for the Mac in every store, but seriously, who cares? You can order the software online, download and activate it, use free alternatives, whatever. I never walk into the store to buy Windows software either, online distribution is much more convenient anyway. For my specific purposes (which are pretty wide, from productivity, to programming, to unix server tasks, to typical end-user purposes, etc), I've not encountered a *single* task for which I could not find decent Mac software. Actually, most Mac equivalents of Windows programs are much better most of the time, especially shareware and free software.