I think this is all a stupid prank, or a Kalisto inside joke/coverup on why they're not releasing anymore.
Why am I skeptical?
1-I'm unsure about the legality of this in the first place. Basically, Sega is bribing these people with stock options, and I'll eat my own shorts if there isn't some law out there that prohibits this.
2-Let's say bribing people with stock is actually legal. Don't you think Sega would make them sign some agreement that they may not disclose this transaction publicly? If I was running a big corporation, I would sure want my bribes to criminals kept secret... maybe Sega of America has a different philosophy about this?
3-Continuing with #2's assumption, what are Sega's stockholders going to think, when they find out that the people who may possibly cripple the Dreamcast console are getting free stocks? Would Sega really be so bold/stupid? How would they explain these actions at stockholder meetings?
4-Just before their announcement, Kalisto had briefly stopped releasing Dreamcast ISOs because they think the Dreamcast ISO "scene" is ungrateful. Shortly thereafter, they released about 4-5 games, then stated that they are no longer releasing anything because Sega is bribing them. This all stinks of trying to find reasons to stop releasing. They could have easily stopped releasing due to the first reason, rather than publicly announcing that they are being paid the "ransom".
5-Just after Kalisto stops releasing, a "new" group called Echelon emerges and immediately starts releasing games using fairly advanced ripping/booting techniques, as if they've been doing it for ages. Looks like Kalisto, smells like Kalisto. Hmmm, maybe this is all just a big name change for a piracy group?
RevHQ: these guys are the music distribution division of Revelation Records, an old punk/hardcore label. You'll find everything from LP versions of Rage Against The Machine records, to good indie metal/hardcore, to stuff like independent pop and rock (emo / indie rock / etc). They sell pretty much everything from all the bigger independent music labels, so its a great easy place to start. The site is also very slick, with online ordering.
Very Distro: this is a very popular punk/hardcore/indie distro. They don't do web ordering, but have a great catalog that costs only a buck. This is more hardcore/metal oriented, however.
The two above should keep you busy for a while. The best way to get into the loop of independent music is to start off by buying compilation records, this way you'll be exposed to the most bands for the lowest cost. Buy lots of zines! I personally prefer Heartattack, it is a very politically oriented punk zine (punk as in the philosophy, not the music:)). Zines are usually chock full of ads for smaller distro houses that will cater to your specific tastes.
Hopefully getting this stuff will encourage you to go to local shows. Its a really great thing to be involved in a music scene where there aren't any rock star personas; everyone is usually down to earth. You'll often have the pleasure of meeting members of your favorite bands, and they'll be glad to chat with you, exchange contacts, and possibly become friends with (that's my favorite part!). Much better than idolizing some boring "artists" while watching MTV!
Have fun! And let me apologize for my punk/hardcore music bias. But there is an independent scene for practically every genre of music!
There are floppy adapters out there for most of the standard flash-based memory cards out there. That means you take pictures with your digicam, pull out the card, stick it into the floppy adapter, then into your computer!
Now consider exploiting this for usage on the Mavica line of digicam - plug a memory card into the floppy adapter, and stick the floppy into your Mavica. Pretty brilliant, huh? With about $20 you just destroyed the one main limitation of the Mavica camera.
By the way, Sony have finally figured out this little tidbit, and the latest model (the MVC-FD95) comes equipped with a 16mb memory stick (this is proprietary sony format) to floppy adapter.
The anti-aliasing algorithm is really simple and typically works really well. Imagine a grid of squares (pixels), and you want to draw a thick diagonal line through this grid.
Now, we'll encounter some problems. In a traditional pixel-drawing scheme, we would color all squares completely covered by this diagonal line, and any other square, even those partially covered by the line will not be colored.
Zoom back from this drawing, and you have a very jagged, aliased line.
Now the anti-aliasing scheme solves the jaggedness by a simple yet clever solution; the squares are shaded depending on what percentage of their area is covered. That is, if a square is 95% covered by the line, it will be very dark, and if it 5% covered, it will be very light. Zoom back from this, and you have a nice smooth anti-aliased line.
Note that other anti-aliasing methods exist for differrent things, but the above is mainly for simple line drawing. For example, when anti-aliasing is done on a 3d rendered scene, a typical solution is to slightly shake the camera and re-render the scene, then blend the different renderings (this is known as oversampling).
Now, this cleartype technology seems interesting. I'm not sure how it works, but judging from the examples given, the fonts look a bit "fuller" when larger on the screen. Also, very small fonts are very easily read, whereas in an antialiased scheme the smaller fonts are difficult to identify (this is probably because the antialiasing algorithm has trouble dealing with sub-pixel drawing instructions). One downside of cleartype, however, is that I noticed a fair amount of green and red color fringing on the small-to-medium fonts. I suppose this type of distortion is a side-effect of taking advantage of sub-pixel drawing technology.
Just some tasty AI morsels
on
Solving Chess?
·
· Score: 3
-Deep Blue's algorithm allowed it to think 11-ply forward, that is, it would create a game tree with depth 11 (this is enormous, considering the massive branching factor of chess, and I bet they used some hacks to reduce the branching factor, ie get rid of trivially bad moves). Kasparov said he can "think" 7-ply forward, which is (by his account) partially why he lost.
-There is still no simple/elegant solution to AI Chess. This is why chess is a realm essentially abandoned by the AI community. There is no decent uniform solution to chess around (whether it involve genetic algorithms, neural nets, or game trees). Deep Blue, while very effective, is apparently full of messy hacks and different AI techniques. And because it uses search trees, it does not run in linear time, like the following example...
-checkers, on the other hand, has a beatiful solution that works quite well. let me quote Russel & Norvig's excellent Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach:
Beginning in 1952, Arthur Samuel of IBM, working in his spare time, developed a checkers program that learned its own evaluation function by playing itself thousands of times. [...] Samuel' program began as a novice, but after only a few days' self-play was able to compete on equal terms in some very strong human tournaments. When one considers that Samuel's computing equipment (an IBM 704) had 10,000 words of main memory, magnetic tape for long-term storage, and a cycle time of almost a millisecond [!!!!!!], this remains one of the great feats of AI.
-solving the game of Go seems to be even more difficult than chess. There is a $2,000,000 prize for the first program to defeat a top level player.
This camera is really great. And because of the recent release of the 3 megapixel S20, the Powershot's price has plummeted.
The Powershot Pro 70 is a professional camera. It has dual memory card slots (one for CF, and one for CF II, this means you can plug in a 340mb IBM microdrive!!) and no built-in flash -- this means you have to buy a seperate flash unit (but considering how great the low-light capabilities of this camera are, you usually won't need a flash anyway). It also comes with a rechargeable NimH battery, along with a proprietary rechargeable (with recharger!). Of course, it has all the professional features like configurable shutter speed, manual focus, aperture priority, etc. Its resolution, more true to the image ratio of professional non-digital cams, is something like 1536x1024.
The lenses on all canon's are incredible, on-par if not better than the Nikon 9xx line of cameras, which are (were?) considered standard-bearers in terms of consumer digital cameras. This particular camera has an infrared light under the lens that does some extremely nice automatic focusing.
This camera is also built to look a lot like an SLR camera, with the zoom switch placed on the side of the lens. Another cool feature is that the LCD display flips open from the camera and can be configured to face any direction -- basically just like the displays on newer video cameras (this is IMHO even better than the nikon 9xx "swivel" design).
And let me remind you that the price of this incredible "pro-sumer" camera has plummeted. You can probably get it for under $600.
Check out the review of this camera, and other high-end consumer/pro-sumer reviews by Phil Askey at photo.askey.net. This dude really knows what's up. I've barely even touched on all the details about this camera so make sure to check it out. And back when he did this review, the only reason the Powershot Pro70 didn't win hands down as one of the best cameras is because it cost about $1200 when it was released!
In all AI theory that I've studied, the programmer must always give the program (whether it be genetic, neural net, or search tree) a "goodness" (or heuristic) function for calculating "how good" its current state in its space is.
So, the programmer is always instilling a "seed" of her own intelligence into the program. Do you believe that true intelligence lies in an AI theory that would somehow come up with its own "goodness function" ? How do you think this could be achieved, or do you believe this lies outside the boundaries of a Turing machine (or algorithm) ?
Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, by Russel & Norvig.
However, before even touching this book, I highly recommend you take some basic computer science courses, or if you're smart get some CS books and learn it yourself (not programming languages, but theoretical stuff like recursion and very basic complexity theory). AI is not a single theory where you can just read a How-To or man page and start coding right away!
1)What do you think distinguishes automata from an intelligent system? How does this affect your research?
2)As AI technology grows (neural nets employing reinforcement learning, genetic programming, faster computers making larger search trees possible, etc), do you think a truly intelligent system (I'll let you define this very subjective term:)) can ever be developed?
Darwin is simply the Mach kernel, renamed. This kernel has been available on x86 processors for some time now (OpenStep/NeXT, OS X's ancestor, used the Mach kernel).
I actually have a Rhapsody for x86 dev release lying around somewhere, and from my experience it was simply OpenStep recompiled with a Mac-like widget set. And from what I've read about OS X, it is still quite similar to Rhapsody, except for the upper software layers which have been redesigned. So it would not surprise me a great deal if Apple one day ported its OS X software to x86 (especially since Mac and PC architecture seem so similar nowadays... although this is just my uneducated opinion:)).
The software package that I prefer using is junkbuster. It is an easy to set up web proxy server that runs on port 8000... it is extremely effective at blocking out banner ads, and it also has options for blocking out suspicious cookies, and preventing $HTTP_USER-type variables from being initialized.
It is unfortunate that we have to go to the trouble of installing these things, but the only cost of running it is the time it takes you to install the software. on the other hand, you'll be protecting your privacy as well as your bandwidth.
you make some really valid points, and i suppose that my own personal bias did imply that "excessive internet time is bad".
however, i would categorize spending 16-18 hours a day using a computer as potentially harmful behaviour. just physically, it's not healthy to be in a sitting position for that many hours, as well as using a keyboard/mouse for that long, as well as being exposed to a high-frequency CRT for that long, etc, etc. psychologically, we really don't know at this point what kind of effect living an internet-based social life can have on a person - and to me that's reason enough to avoid doing it (excessively).
you might feel that i'm nit-picking, but many,many people will attest that the above problems are all too real.
and that's not even mentioning that the internet is a great big trap for people who are prone to addictive behaviour.
is it just me, or is it not at least mildly disturbing that someone's college life can be _defined_ by the bandwidth of their network connections?
i'm in college, and while the high bandwidth is great, all it means to me is that slashdot and the 5 other sites i visit regularly load up faster. sometimes it also means that downloading that > 10 meg file isn't that big a deal.
those people whose lives are being defined by this "bandwidth glut" should perhaps re-evaluate how they're spending their free time:)
A few months ago I decided to no longer actively help newbies with their linux-related troubles. Why? Well, for several reasons:
- Most newbies do not read documentation. If they do, they seem to only skim through it and choose not to "swallow" any of it.
- They are often rude. Most newbies who have access to my phone number seem to have a lack of respect for my own time. Believe it or not, people have accosted me verbally for choosing to no longer help them. I just hate when they get offended when you choose not to help!
- They ask far too general questions. "How do I get on the net with Linux?". Of course, if you decide to help with this question, they'll get irritated when you start getting into the details of how things work. You see, newbies want to gloss over everything without having at least some fundamental knowledge of how things work. There are currently other great (and not so great) operating systems for people who do not want to get into these issues.
What I'm getting at is that a lot of people's time is getting wasted on helping people who just decided to "jump on the ol' linux bandwagon". While there's nothing wrong with trying to learn linux, when you're only doing it to be hip and you don't have the fortitude to RTFM, you'll be stepping on some toes!
\end{venting}
Of course, I don't mean all newbies are like this. I was a newbie once! But of course, I bought the books and I read them. Unlike the masses of recent linux converts.
Probably the best way to brute force a solution to this problem is to use a bi-directional search tree.
Imagine two points in a space, one is the starting state of the chess game, and one the ending state. You branch outwards from both points, where the first state branches forward through game states, and the other branches backward through game states. Whenever either of these two trees touch (i.e. they share a common node), we have found a solution.
Given that the path length between the two points cannot exceed 5 (5 moves), it would be safe to limit the height of each tree to 5, or if you're clever, ceiling(5/2) (i'm not too sure about this part, data structures people should speak up about this).
AFAIK, using this search method should not strain a high-end vector processor in the least; it might even be doable on a high-end workstation. Given that the branching factor of a chess game is completely insane, a large memory would be useful to store each tree through every iteration.
The one thing that bothers me is that people a lot smarter than me must have already tried this. And failed, since no one has posted a solution. Maybe there is no solution?
What people need to understand here is that being a computer programmer is completely and utterly different than being a computer scientist.
A computer programmer is someone capable of using certain tools to construct computer applications. OTOH, a computer scientist is someone who studies the science of computation (which really only recently has anything to do with the machines we call "computers").
AFAIK, Miguel is a computer programmer. OTOH, Don Knuth is one of the most recognized and cited computer scientists in history. Miguel has apparently written much of the code for cool graphical apps for unix, which is commendable, while Don Knuth has contributed to the science of computing so much so that he is cited in nearly every computer science related book I have ever read. (this includes books dealing with topics ranging from databases, to computer graphics, to artificial intelligence). Forget about TeX (which is fabulous software that I use weekly), Don Knuth's contributions to the science of computing exceed any hacking efforts by several orders of magnitude.
So, Miguel gets the award. You got to love how money and politics has changed the computer world.
Just out of curiosity, I was wondering if anyone knew what type of AI routines this dog is using.
After hearing that this thing actually learns, I'm guessing it uses some type of neural network.
Can anyone explain exactly _what_ this dog learns, and how well it learns it? I'd love to read some technical papers discussing what makes this thing "tick".
Maybe we could teach it to solve the TSP from constantly taking it on walks:P
this patch could conceivably be very dangerous. what if someone compromises root and gets a hold of a BFG ? or if someone took a chainsaw to your shell session. i'm getting queasy already.
they should send kill messages to owners of the killed processes. i could see it now... my quota's full so autosave stopped working, and someone kills xemacs after an all night coding session. "XEmacs was fragged by [31337 Cl4nn3r]"
Meaning no disrespect to anyone, I'm wondering why this "analysis" was posted as a seperate story.
AFAIK, Slashdot is structured so that responses (even "analyses" (sp?)) have their place in the response section. If the response/analysis is especially good, then it will most likely be given a high score and more people will then be likely to read it.
So, I ask, what is so special about this story? Is it particularly better than any of the responses to the original story? Maybe, but I personally don't think so. Does it represent some completely different facet of the original story? Again, maybe, but in my humble opinion, no. And finally, was this posted because the poster is a special|important|nice| person? I sure hope not.
Please someone shed some light on this, as my whole world is turning upside down.:)
Slashdot Mirror
I think this is all a stupid prank, or a Kalisto inside joke/coverup on why they're not releasing anymore.
... maybe Sega of America has a different philosophy about this?
Why am I skeptical?
1-I'm unsure about the legality of this in the first place. Basically, Sega is bribing these people with stock options, and I'll eat my own shorts if there isn't some law out there that prohibits this.
2-Let's say bribing people with stock is actually legal. Don't you think Sega would make them sign some agreement that they may not disclose this transaction publicly? If I was running a big corporation, I would sure want my bribes to criminals kept secret
3-Continuing with #2's assumption, what are Sega's stockholders going to think, when they find out that the people who may possibly cripple the Dreamcast console are getting free stocks? Would Sega really be so bold/stupid? How would they explain these actions at stockholder meetings?
4-Just before their announcement, Kalisto had briefly stopped releasing Dreamcast ISOs because they think the Dreamcast ISO "scene" is ungrateful. Shortly thereafter, they released about 4-5 games, then stated that they are no longer releasing anything because Sega is bribing them. This all stinks of trying to find reasons to stop releasing. They could have easily stopped releasing due to the first reason, rather than publicly announcing that they are being paid the "ransom".
5-Just after Kalisto stops releasing, a "new" group called Echelon emerges and immediately starts releasing games using fairly advanced ripping/booting techniques, as if they've been doing it for ages. Looks like Kalisto, smells like Kalisto. Hmmm, maybe this is all just a big name change for a piracy group?
RevHQ: these guys are the music distribution division of Revelation Records, an old punk/hardcore label. You'll find everything from LP versions of Rage Against The Machine records, to good indie metal/hardcore, to stuff like independent pop and rock (emo / indie rock / etc). They sell pretty much everything from all the bigger independent music labels, so its a great easy place to start. The site is also very slick, with online ordering.
:)). Zines are usually chock full of ads for smaller distro houses that will cater to your specific tastes.
Very Distro: this is a very popular punk/hardcore/indie distro. They don't do web ordering, but have a great catalog that costs only a buck. This is more hardcore/metal oriented, however.
The two above should keep you busy for a while. The best way to get into the loop of independent music is to start off by buying compilation records, this way you'll be exposed to the most bands for the lowest cost. Buy lots of zines! I personally prefer Heartattack, it is a very politically oriented punk zine (punk as in the philosophy, not the music
Hopefully getting this stuff will encourage you to go to local shows. Its a really great thing to be involved in a music scene where there aren't any rock star personas; everyone is usually down to earth. You'll often have the pleasure of meeting members of your favorite bands, and they'll be glad to chat with you, exchange contacts, and possibly become friends with (that's my favorite part!). Much better than idolizing some boring "artists" while watching MTV!
Have fun! And let me apologize for my punk/hardcore music bias. But there is an independent scene for practically every genre of music!
mulletsgalore.com
hairstyle of the gods!
There are floppy adapters out there for most of the standard flash-based memory cards out there. That means you take pictures with your digicam, pull out the card, stick it into the floppy adapter, then into your computer!
Now consider exploiting this for usage on the Mavica line of digicam - plug a memory card into the floppy adapter, and stick the floppy into your Mavica. Pretty brilliant, huh? With about $20 you just destroyed the one main limitation of the Mavica camera.
By the way, Sony have finally figured out this little tidbit, and the latest model (the MVC-FD95) comes equipped with a 16mb memory stick (this is proprietary sony format) to floppy adapter.
The anti-aliasing algorithm is really simple and typically works really well. Imagine a grid of squares (pixels), and you want to draw a thick diagonal line through this grid.
Now, we'll encounter some problems. In a traditional pixel-drawing scheme, we would color all squares completely covered by this diagonal line, and any other square, even those partially covered by the line will not be colored.
Zoom back from this drawing, and you have a very jagged, aliased line.
Now the anti-aliasing scheme solves the jaggedness by a simple yet clever solution; the squares are shaded depending on what percentage of their area is covered. That is, if a square is 95% covered by the line, it will be very dark, and if it 5% covered, it will be very light. Zoom back from this, and you have a nice smooth anti-aliased line.
Note that other anti-aliasing methods exist for differrent things, but the above is mainly for simple line drawing. For example, when anti-aliasing is done on a 3d rendered scene, a typical solution is to slightly shake the camera and re-render the scene, then blend the different renderings (this is known as oversampling).
Now, this cleartype technology seems interesting. I'm not sure how it works, but judging from the examples given, the fonts look a bit "fuller" when larger on the screen. Also, very small fonts are very easily read, whereas in an antialiased scheme the smaller fonts are difficult to identify (this is probably because the antialiasing algorithm has trouble dealing with sub-pixel drawing instructions). One downside of cleartype, however, is that I noticed a fair amount of green and red color fringing on the small-to-medium fonts. I suppose this type of distortion is a side-effect of taking advantage of sub-pixel drawing technology.
-There is still no simple/elegant solution to AI Chess. This is why chess is a realm essentially abandoned by the AI community. There is no decent uniform solution to chess around (whether it involve genetic algorithms, neural nets, or game trees). Deep Blue, while very effective, is apparently full of messy hacks and different AI techniques. And because it uses search trees, it does not run in linear time, like the following example
-checkers, on the other hand, has a beatiful solution that works quite well. let me quote Russel & Norvig's excellent Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach:
-solving the game of Go seems to be even more difficult than chess. There is a $2,000,000 prize for the first program to defeat a top level player.
This camera is really great. And because of the recent release of the 3 megapixel S20, the Powershot's price has plummeted.
The Powershot Pro 70 is a professional camera. It has dual memory card slots (one for CF, and one for CF II, this means you can plug in a 340mb IBM microdrive!!) and no built-in flash -- this means you have to buy a seperate flash unit (but considering how great the low-light capabilities of this camera are, you usually won't need a flash anyway). It also comes with a rechargeable NimH battery, along with a proprietary rechargeable (with recharger!). Of course, it has all the professional features like configurable shutter speed, manual focus, aperture priority, etc. Its resolution, more true to the image ratio of professional non-digital cams, is something like 1536x1024.
The lenses on all canon's are incredible, on-par if not better than the Nikon 9xx line of cameras, which are (were?) considered standard-bearers in terms of consumer digital cameras. This particular camera has an infrared light under the lens that does some extremely nice automatic focusing.
This camera is also built to look a lot like an SLR camera, with the zoom switch placed on the side of the lens. Another cool feature is that the LCD display flips open from the camera and can be configured to face any direction -- basically just like the displays on newer video cameras (this is IMHO even better than the nikon 9xx "swivel" design).
And let me remind you that the price of this incredible "pro-sumer" camera has plummeted. You can probably get it for under $600.
Check out the review of this camera, and other high-end consumer/pro-sumer reviews by Phil Askey at photo.askey.net. This dude really knows what's up. I've barely even touched on all the details about this camera so make sure to check it out. And back when he did this review, the only reason the Powershot Pro70 didn't win hands down as one of the best cameras is because it cost about $1200 when it was released!
In all AI theory that I've studied, the programmer must always give the program (whether it be genetic, neural net, or search tree) a "goodness" (or heuristic) function for calculating "how good" its current state in its space is.
So, the programmer is always instilling a "seed" of her own intelligence into the program. Do you believe that true intelligence lies in an AI theory that would somehow come up with its own "goodness function" ? How do you think this could be achieved, or do you believe this lies outside the boundaries of a Turing machine (or algorithm) ?
Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, by Russel & Norvig.
However, before even touching this book, I highly recommend you take some basic computer science courses, or if you're smart get some CS books and learn it yourself (not programming languages, but theoretical stuff like recursion and very basic complexity theory). AI is not a single theory where you can just read a How-To or man page and start coding right away!
1)What do you think distinguishes automata from an intelligent system? How does this affect your research?
:)) can ever be developed?
2)As AI technology grows (neural nets employing reinforcement learning, genetic programming, faster computers making larger search trees possible, etc), do you think a truly intelligent system (I'll let you define this very subjective term
Thanks, Mani.
Darwin is simply the Mach kernel, renamed. This kernel has been available on x86 processors for some time now (OpenStep/NeXT, OS X's ancestor, used the Mach kernel).
... although this is just my uneducated opinion :)).
I actually have a Rhapsody for x86 dev release lying around somewhere, and from my experience it was simply OpenStep recompiled with a Mac-like widget set. And from what I've read about OS X, it is still quite similar to Rhapsody, except for the upper software layers which have been redesigned. So it would not surprise me a great deal if Apple one day ported its OS X software to x86 (especially since Mac and PC architecture seem so similar nowadays
The software package that I prefer using is junkbuster. It is an easy to set up web proxy server that runs on port 8000 ... it is extremely effective at blocking out banner ads, and it also has options for blocking out suspicious cookies, and preventing $HTTP_USER-type variables from being initialized.
It is unfortunate that we have to go to the trouble of installing these things, but the only cost of running it is the time it takes you to install the software. on the other hand, you'll be protecting your privacy as well as your bandwidth.
you make some really valid points, and i suppose that my own personal bias did imply that "excessive internet time is bad".
:)
however, i would categorize spending 16-18 hours a day using a computer as potentially harmful behaviour. just physically, it's not healthy to be in a sitting position for that many hours, as well as using a keyboard/mouse for that long, as well as being exposed to a high-frequency CRT for that long, etc, etc. psychologically, we really don't know at this point what kind of effect living an internet-based social life can have on a person - and to me that's reason enough to avoid doing it (excessively).
you might feel that i'm nit-picking, but many,many people will attest that the above problems are all too real.
and that's not even mentioning that the internet is a great big trap for people who are prone to addictive behaviour.
does that satisfy your question?
is it just me, or is it not at least mildly disturbing that someone's college life can be _defined_ by the bandwidth of their network connections?
:)
i'm in college, and while the high bandwidth is great, all it means to me is that slashdot and the 5 other sites i visit regularly load up faster. sometimes it also means that downloading that > 10 meg file isn't that big a deal.
those people whose lives are being defined by this "bandwidth glut" should perhaps re-evaluate how they're spending their free time
These are basically plug-ins (similar to The Gimp) made for the POV-ray raytracer. His include files do some of the following things:
- Generate cities: why model an entire city when you can simply run his include file which will randomly create one for you?
- Liquid Spray: check out his screenshots/movies and drool.
- Object Exploder: nuff said
- Object Bender: easily bend an entire object. check out his movie of a pencil bouncing along the ground.
- Galaxy: create a beatiful, animated, randomly generated galaxy as the sky for your rendering. this one is stunning.
These are only a few examples of his include files. The POV-ray home page describes that Chris basically invented the "include file".
Thanks, Chris, from a newbie POV-ray user who is already doing some really cool graphics thanks to your plugins.
A few months ago I decided to no longer actively help newbies with their linux-related troubles. Why? Well, for several reasons:
- Most newbies do not read documentation. If they do, they seem to only skim through it and choose not to "swallow" any of it.
- They are often rude. Most newbies who have access to my phone number seem to have a lack of respect for my own time. Believe it or not, people have accosted me verbally for choosing to no longer help them. I just hate when they get offended when you choose not to help!
- They ask far too general questions. "How do I get on the net with Linux?". Of course, if you decide to help with this question, they'll get irritated when you start getting into the details of how things work. You see, newbies want to gloss over everything without having at least some fundamental knowledge of how things work. There are currently other great (and not so great) operating systems for people who do not want to get into these issues.
What I'm getting at is that a lot of people's time is getting wasted on helping people who just decided to "jump on the ol' linux bandwagon". While there's nothing wrong with trying to learn linux, when you're only doing it to be hip and you don't have the fortitude to RTFM, you'll be stepping on some toes!
\end{venting}
Of course, I don't mean all newbies are like this. I was a newbie once! But of course, I bought the books and I read them. Unlike the masses of recent linux converts.
Probably the best way to brute force a solution to this problem is to use a bi-directional search tree.
Imagine two points in a space, one is the starting state of the chess game, and one the ending state. You branch outwards from both points, where the first state branches forward through game states, and the other branches backward through game states. Whenever either of these two trees touch (i.e. they share a common node), we have found a solution.
Given that the path length between the two points cannot exceed 5 (5 moves), it would be safe to limit the height of each tree to 5, or if you're clever, ceiling(5/2) (i'm not too sure about this part, data structures people should speak up about this).
AFAIK, using this search method should not strain a high-end vector processor in the least; it might even be doable on a high-end workstation. Given that the branching factor of a chess game is completely insane, a large memory would be useful to store each tree through every iteration.
The one thing that bothers me is that people a lot smarter than me must have already tried this. And failed, since no one has posted a solution. Maybe there is no solution?
Please correct me!
What people need to understand here is that being a computer programmer is completely and utterly different than being a computer scientist.
A computer programmer is someone capable of using certain tools to construct computer applications. OTOH, a computer scientist is someone who studies the science of computation (which really only recently has anything to do with the machines we call "computers").
AFAIK, Miguel is a computer programmer. OTOH, Don Knuth is one of the most recognized and cited computer scientists in history. Miguel has apparently written much of the code for cool graphical apps for unix, which is commendable, while Don Knuth has contributed to the science of computing so much so that he is cited in nearly every computer science related book I have ever read. (this includes books dealing with topics ranging from databases, to computer graphics, to artificial intelligence). Forget about TeX (which is fabulous software that I use weekly), Don Knuth's contributions to the science of computing exceed any hacking efforts by several orders of magnitude.
So, Miguel gets the award. You got to love how money and politics has changed the computer world.
Just out of curiosity, I was wondering if anyone knew what type of AI routines this dog is using.
:P
After hearing that this thing actually learns, I'm guessing it uses some type of neural network.
Can anyone explain exactly _what_ this dog learns, and how well it learns it? I'd love to read some technical papers discussing what makes this thing "tick".
Maybe we could teach it to solve the TSP from constantly taking it on walks
to "zombie process".
... my quota's full so autosave stopped working, and someone kills xemacs after an all night coding session. "XEmacs was fragged by [31337 Cl4nn3r]"
this patch could conceivably be very dangerous. what if someone compromises root and gets a hold of a BFG ? or if someone took a chainsaw to your shell session. i'm getting queasy already.
they should send kill messages to owners of the killed processes. i could see it now
There is a package that seems to be under development called "OpenSales", an open-source e-commerce solution. It is being developed by IdeaLab.
/09/29/2048229.shtml.
:)
Magic-SW also looks interesting.
Here's a link to a Slashdot post about the above, you might find some of the responses helpful: http://slashdot.org/articles/99
Personally, I'll keep using XEmacs, apache, perl, php, and MySQL as my "e-commerce solution".
Meaning no disrespect to anyone, I'm wondering why this "analysis" was posted as a seperate story.
:)
AFAIK, Slashdot is structured so that responses (even "analyses" (sp?)) have their place in the response section. If the response/analysis is especially good, then it will most likely be given a high score and more people will then be likely to read it.
So, I ask, what is so special about this story? Is it particularly better than any of the responses to the original story? Maybe, but I personally don't think so. Does it represent some completely different facet of the original story? Again, maybe, but in my humble opinion, no. And finally, was this posted because the poster is a special|important|nice| person? I sure hope not.
Please someone shed some light on this, as my whole world is turning upside down.
i am posting this with the dc browser! i dont care about psx2 no more...this shit is dope!
dreamcast comes with a 56k modem, and a NIC will be coming soon (it is currently in testing).
gameplay will be through a heat.net type client (developed by heat.net), and as far as i know it doesn't cost anything.
you will need a standard internet connection for it to work (aol AFAIK will not work).
woops. i just visited the site and was pretty impressed. i take back most of what i said. i am sorry.