Re:Not a troll: How many civilians died last time?
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 1
Why is it that so many people forget to put any sort of blame on Saddam and his government?
Because expecting a sadist who has in the past thrown nervegas at his own population to actually care about that same population dying of starvation is, to put it gently, naive.
You are presuming a non-existant level playing field. If there ever was a free market in this country, it must have been sometime before 1860, and after 1800. I didn't study much history covering that period. Possibly also some time before 1750. But I consider this unlikely.
You're quite right, a free market existed in 1839, on the third of april, around noon. Then people went for lunch and it dissappeared.
In the world you're describing, the support tech would lead the user to the web site of the sound card manufacturor, download the module installation program for the stock kernel installed on that particular machine, which on execution will install the precompiled module
How do you think people install new hardware on Windows? No, Windows does not autodetect everything.
Re:Want to sell this POS game?
on
Sim-Dud?
·
· Score: 1
No, they should add a rocket launcher. I think every game can benefit from the inclusion of a rocket launcher.
Ah, this 2^31 brings back memories of the time I had a box for scientific work with appr 4Gb of addressable memory (most of it RAM, but also some swapspace), and wanted to view some kind of lame proprietary video format, with proprietary viewer. When starting up the application it would complain I had less than 4 MB of memory (while in fact I had a thousandfold of that).
Hmm, the programmers seemed to store the information in an int, so by allocating 2 MB of memory (through Matlab, zeros(10000,10000) is quite a chunk), I could finally convince the application that I did not have negative memory, but actually enough to display the movie.
I'm not sure about the geek from redmond, but
before you belittle penguins, consider
these words from Linus Torvalds:
"Some people have told me they don't think a fat penguin really embodies the grace of Linux. Which just tells me they have never seen a angry penguin charging at them in excess of 100 mph. They'd be a lot more careful about what they say if they had."
Try to get to the Netherlands, Maastricht
should be close enough, or any other decent sized town (Venlo, Arnhem,...). There will be
subtitles on the bottom of the screen, but
the spoken word will be English.
Phrasing of the grandparent was a bit wrong, it should be:
Traditionally, they were able...
Now they're broke...
And yes, the Dutch government has decided that
the Dutch educational system can be top of the
line with spending less money on education (in percentage points of the GNP) than Uganda.
The truly sad thing is that the statistic
above was from last year. Now they're cutting
another 5 percent. Ah well, nothing bad,
my university is coping by not renewing any temporary contracts. So that will
get rid of all postdocs funded by the universities directly.
Now I'm going to continue writing that grant
proposal.
First, start with installing an
stock RedHat 6.2 on a box. Make
it a server install. Connect to internet.
Don't set up a firewall.
Furthermore, make sure that the box will
be used as the only mail server of the company right from the start.
After the machine is hacked in
15 minutes, management and all coworkers will give you at most 24 hours to
make the server productive and safe.
After this longest day, you will have
learned the essentials of Unix Administration.
funny this use of the word 'implement'.
Where in the GPL (or in copyright law for that
matter) does it state that you
cannot 'implement' the research. With a GPL
license you cannot simply copy the source
code verbatim in your proprietary product. If
you want to go proprietary with some GPL implementation of some research, you actually
have to study the research papers. Due to the GPL, you can also study the source code, but you have to understand it fully
to implement your own version. You don't have to re-engineer the code, you don't need a cleanroom implementation, you simply have to study and write it yourself.
Instead of this, with a BSD-style license you
get a 'copy and forget' style of proprietary software
development. "Yes, those research boys probably
know what they were doing, let's just copy the
source and make money out of it."
This is a really solid
way of getting crappy products out.
So now we can combine the readability of both C and Perl with the elegant memory protection of C?
Re:How to totally screw up Win2k in less than 1 mi
on
Gnarly Error Messages
·
· Score: 2
On a related note, I was once trying to get a
usb camera working on win2k, and had to remove
all these plug-and-play drivers that win2k
thought I wanted, to be able to install the
real drivers. I encountered an 'unknown device'.
Well, as I didn't want an 'unknown device',
I deleted it.
It turned out that every driver starts out as
an unknown device before it gets installed,
but still depends on the presence of the unknown
device. So all, yes *all*, my drivers got flushed
and the machine being a laptop, I had to reinstall all the firmware from scratch.
Of course I got the default message that all
drivers that depended on this driver would get deleted as well, but this is something you also get when no drivers depend on the thing. But no,
a simple list of the stuff it is about to delete
was too much trouble.
I can't find the source so quickly, but I seem to
remember that Judge Jackson did not express
any bias prior to the trial. At worst he
expressed bias during, but I seem to remember
he gave only interviews after the trial.
This 'bias' was caused by
the behaviour of Microsoft in court.
I remember as it seemed very odd to me at the
time. This judge has been lied to
during the trial, and when he says that he's
pissed off at being lied to after the trial, he is expressing
bias and the case is annulled.
But then again, I might be remembering it wrongly
altogether. Funny though, if he would have
spoken about the trial before the trial to the
media, how could he have ever been selected as the judge
for the trial?
Sorry, subtly wrong setup. Scientific theories
are not about verifiable experiments,
but about falsifiable ones. At least
according to Popper.
So let's change it to:
What predictions can you make upon the theory you
espouse, whose falsification would lead you to
abandon your theory?
If you cannot find such an experiment (as in the
case of creationism), your theory will not
be considered scientific. And believe me,
evolution theory has its problems with this one,
as ol' Popper was always happy to point out.
However, one
thing that evolution theory correctly predicts
is the result that individuals from isolated populations will
after a (sometimes fairly small) number of generations no longer be able
to create viable offspring with eachother. This
has been tested with fruitflies in jars. Simply
take a few jars and keep breeding them flies, preferably
on a different diet. At
a certain point, the flies from one jar will no longer
be able to produce offspring with the flies from the other jar.
This is called speciation, and seems to work both
theoretically and experimentally.
As for creationism? what experiment can one
devise that would refute it? If you can't,
bye bye creationism.
With Einstein, many predictions about the nature
of time and of atomic clocks flying in orbits
could be made that would completely falsify
his theory if they would give different results.
Interestingly, they didn't, so now we consider
his theory 'momentarily' true. Note that if some
other predictions following from the theory would
turn out false, some real re-working is in order,
or otherwise it will go to the scrapheap.
How can you trust eyes (created through a series of random events) to see anything correctly? How do you trust your brain's (again, created through a series of random events) interpretation of what your eyes see? The ridiculousness goes on and on.
Sigh. The whole 'created through a series of random events'
paraphrase is a typical creationist half characterization.
You can trust your eyes because if you couldn't,
your ancestors (possibly at fish level) would long ago have starved from
lack of food as they couldn't locate the stuff. Without sound logic, you couldn't
trust the plan you'd made to kill that animal/neighbouring tribe,
now would you?
Evolution is not random change, but random change
combined with struggle for survival. The latter is
the half you're purposefully ignoring and that's the one that
annihilates your argument.
I'm not sure whether Paul actually called
his method Bayesian or not, but this is an easy
source of confusion. The method is called 'naive Bayes'
because of the wrong assumption it makes.
In effect: the name Naive Bayes actually implies
that the method is not Bayesian at all, as it makes
naive, non-bayesian assumptions. The reason
Bayes is put in there in the first place is
because it uses Bayes rule to calculate the
'probability'. However, if you check the formula,
p(C|W) = prod(P(W_i|C)) * p(C), you will soon
notice that the reliance on P(C) is completely
superfluous as it will not make much difference
in the prediction. (You can check this by seeing
that P(C) is only one probability, while the product
is on all the words you consider, which can be thousands).
You can easily check that using the left hand
side of the rule or the first part of the left
hand side will hardly ever make any difference.
The method has a long history in information
retrieval. I think people have used it
since the sixties. There it is commonly referred to
as the 'multinomial model'. This in contrast
with the 'multivariate model' that takes not
counts but only occurance/no-occurance of words into account.
BTW, for people interested in implementing this:
DO NOT multiply the probabilities, but add the negative
logs of them. This will save you from destructive
floating point errors.
Use 'v' or 'V' (SHIFT-V) to get into 'visual' mode. With little 'v'-mode you can select characters, while with big 'V'-mode you select lines. Now you can use 'y' (yank) or 'd' to copy/cut the block, ':e newfile' to open a new file and 'p' (paste) to paste in the block.
Yes, selecting blocks using line-numbers is a pain
Ok, I'll bite. Your calculation (no quotes),
calculates all valid position with 5 stones.
These are the leafs in the search tree. You
miss all positions of 4,3,2 and 1, all possible
ways that you can reach the 5 stones position.
Including those
will get you to the 12 digit number I used.
Why you need these position as well? Simple,
we are placing stones successively here,
and a mini-max strategy needs to evaluate
these as well; some intermediate positions might be
immediately losing, so they will be pruned.
Go is played on a grid of 19 by 19.
The players add stones progressively,
so we're looking at a search tree
with an initial branching factor
of 361, and the factor will decrease
by one with each move (this discounts illegal
moves, of which there are a few). So we're looking
at a total search space of 361! (factorial).
Even searching until depth 5
will give you about 6 * 10^12 possible positions.
A bit more than a few billion. Compared to this, the
game of chess (with a maximum branching factor
of 32) is trivial.
At some point our uni beowulf got cracked together with
the 200+ of computers for the students. It took
a couple of weeks for someone to figure out that
this happened and that the entire batch of machines was doing nothing
else but password cracking.
It was figured out that the crackers got access through
brute-forcing one of our passwords
(through some other universities resources? who knows)
So yes, crackers can and do have access to the computing power to brute-force
passwords. The more successfull they are, the more
successfull they get.
Well, sucker me, I actually modded you up.
Thanks for the advise to search the internet though,
so I have the opportunity to post a link where people might find the original.
Slashdot Mirror
Because expecting a sadist who has in the past thrown nervegas at his own population to actually care about that same population dying of starvation is, to put it gently, naive.
You're quite right, a free market existed in 1839, on the third of april, around noon. Then people went for lunch and it dissappeared.
How do you think people install new hardware on Windows? No, Windows does not autodetect everything.
No, they should add a rocket launcher. I think every game can benefit from the inclusion of a rocket launcher.
Mailing address: First Revolutionary Road, P'yongyang, North Korea
Hmm, the programmers seemed to store the information in an int, so by allocating 2 MB of memory (through Matlab, zeros(10000,10000) is quite a chunk), I could finally convince the application that I did not have negative memory, but actually enough to display the movie.
But then the video was lame.
next thing you know, people will claim you can reach India by going West over the Atlantic!
Try to get to the Netherlands, Maastricht should be close enough, or any other decent sized town (Venlo, Arnhem,...). There will be subtitles on the bottom of the screen, but the spoken word will be English.
Yep, and if I subsequently don't request the pop-up ad, I'm suddenly blocking it?
Weird wide world.
Traditionally, they were able...
Now they're broke...
And yes, the Dutch government has decided that the Dutch educational system can be top of the line with spending less money on education (in percentage points of the GNP) than Uganda.
The truly sad thing is that the statistic above was from last year. Now they're cutting another 5 percent. Ah well, nothing bad, my university is coping by not renewing any temporary contracts. So that will get rid of all postdocs funded by the universities directly.
Now I'm going to continue writing that grant proposal.
[ESC]:q[ENTER]
:![ENTER]
:q[ENTER]
E37: No write since last change (use ! to override)
!
!!
E37: No write since last change (use ! to override)
^C
^C
^D
^Z
$> logout
there are stopped jobs
$> jobs
[1]+ Stopped vi hi
$> start 1
bash: start: command not found
$> logout
there are stopped jobs
$> logout
c:\windows>
After the machine is hacked in 15 minutes, management and all coworkers will give you at most 24 hours to make the server productive and safe. After this longest day, you will have learned the essentials of Unix Administration.
Instead of this, with a BSD-style license you get a 'copy and forget' style of proprietary software development. "Yes, those research boys probably know what they were doing, let's just copy the source and make money out of it." This is a really solid way of getting crappy products out.
So now we can combine the readability of both C and Perl with the elegant memory protection of C?
It turned out that every driver starts out as an unknown device before it gets installed, but still depends on the presence of the unknown device. So all, yes *all*, my drivers got flushed and the machine being a laptop, I had to reinstall all the firmware from scratch.
Of course I got the default message that all drivers that depended on this driver would get deleted as well, but this is something you also get when no drivers depend on the thing. But no, a simple list of the stuff it is about to delete was too much trouble.
I remember as it seemed very odd to me at the time. This judge has been lied to during the trial, and when he says that he's pissed off at being lied to after the trial, he is expressing bias and the case is annulled.
But then again, I might be remembering it wrongly altogether. Funny though, if he would have spoken about the trial before the trial to the media, how could he have ever been selected as the judge for the trial?
So let's change it to:
What predictions can you make upon the theory you espouse, whose falsification would lead you to abandon your theory?
If you cannot find such an experiment (as in the case of creationism), your theory will not be considered scientific. And believe me, evolution theory has its problems with this one, as ol' Popper was always happy to point out.
However, one thing that evolution theory correctly predicts is the result that individuals from isolated populations will after a (sometimes fairly small) number of generations no longer be able to create viable offspring with eachother. This has been tested with fruitflies in jars. Simply take a few jars and keep breeding them flies, preferably on a different diet. At a certain point, the flies from one jar will no longer be able to produce offspring with the flies from the other jar. This is called speciation, and seems to work both theoretically and experimentally.
As for creationism? what experiment can one devise that would refute it? If you can't, bye bye creationism.
With Einstein, many predictions about the nature of time and of atomic clocks flying in orbits could be made that would completely falsify his theory if they would give different results. Interestingly, they didn't, so now we consider his theory 'momentarily' true. Note that if some other predictions following from the theory would turn out false, some real re-working is in order, or otherwise it will go to the scrapheap.
Sigh. The whole 'created through a series of random events' paraphrase is a typical creationist half characterization. You can trust your eyes because if you couldn't, your ancestors (possibly at fish level) would long ago have starved from lack of food as they couldn't locate the stuff. Without sound logic, you couldn't trust the plan you'd made to kill that animal/neighbouring tribe, now would you?
Evolution is not random change, but random change combined with struggle for survival. The latter is the half you're purposefully ignoring and that's the one that annihilates your argument.
The method has a long history in information retrieval. I think people have used it since the sixties. There it is commonly referred to as the 'multinomial model'. This in contrast with the 'multivariate model' that takes not counts but only occurance/no-occurance of words into account.
BTW, for people interested in implementing this: DO NOT multiply the probabilities, but add the negative logs of them. This will save you from destructive floating point errors.
In Vim:
Use 'v' or 'V' (SHIFT-V) to get into 'visual'
mode. With little 'v'-mode you can select characters,
while with big 'V'-mode you select lines. Now
you can use 'y' (yank) or 'd' to copy/cut the block,
':e newfile' to open a new file and 'p' (paste)
to paste in the block.
Yes, selecting blocks using line-numbers is a pain
Why you need these position as well? Simple, we are placing stones successively here, and a mini-max strategy needs to evaluate these as well; some intermediate positions might be immediately losing, so they will be pruned.
Even searching until depth 5 will give you about 6 * 10^12 possible positions. A bit more than a few billion. Compared to this, the game of chess (with a maximum branching factor of 32) is trivial.
At some point our uni beowulf got cracked together with the 200+ of computers for the students. It took a couple of weeks for someone to figure out that this happened and that the entire batch of machines was doing nothing else but password cracking. It was figured out that the crackers got access through brute-forcing one of our passwords (through some other universities resources? who knows) So yes, crackers can and do have access to the computing power to brute-force passwords. The more successfull they are, the more successfull they get.
It is a good story though, thanks for the laugh.