Advertisements on the web may be the most common way to turn a profit online, but it's certainly not the universe anyone really wanted except for advertising firms.
I would gladly pay $5 a month for wikipedia to exist without ads. In fact, I would almost always pay money rather than see ads for any service (as I eventually did on slashdot, incidentally). So perhaps wikipedia should adopt the slashdot model: No ads for special or paying members- everyone else gets non intrusive ads (by special, I mean long term members, frequent contributors, etc.). You could even adopt a system where contributors get "points" which allow them to not see ads.
It's not just the availability of cheap food that leads to higher obesity among the poor. The quality of cheap food (eg. fast food, bread, rice, and questionable canned food) is likely the true cause.
Yeah... I was thinking the same thing. Good bye to C and Assembler? Ahhh, they mean goodbye to any low level hardware I/O or custom drivers... nice.
There is an assembler called Phantasm, which would fill the niche you suggest is missing. Of course any alternative to C / assembler is viewed with skepticism due to non plausible coexistence with current systems / hardware.
The shinier the Mac, the higher above that number it goes. They make the cheapest models black for a reason. Actually, the black mac books were (are?) an additional $150 to the usual white.
Wow, Dr. Thompson is very seriously abusing statistics! For the sake of entertainment, let's analyze a few flaws of the deaths per minute evaluation:
(1) hmmm so a game bent on world domination? How many deaths per minute? Destroying an entire nation, so around 500,000,000? (2) a game bent on interplanetary warefare: ie. destroying an entire planet? (3) Time scale...some games move slowly, others jump in years per second! Somehow I doubt Dr. Thompson accounted for this.
Fact is, measuring violence in games accurately is an extremely complex problem. Here's a scientific alternative using some simple AI that has to be *somewhat* better than their approach.
(1) extract a set of simple "features" that may help determine volient / non-violent games and write them down in a list for each game. (2) Have people rate the violence of each game from 1 to 10 (where 10 = will not allow child to watch, 0 = perfectly safe and innocent for any age) (3) train a classifier via a standard supervised learning algorithm
Of course, step 1 is a bit difficult and requires human knowledge, but any system where one tries to measure violence will require some human intervention (machines aren't smart enough yet).
The ability to play tetris while it copied packages to disc during installation! That rocked. It was with X as well. In fact, Corel's install easibility was nothing to sneeze at.
In fact, I can't quite ascertain why they never really took off...even I didn't use that it that long. Perhaps Coral's variations from the main stream redhat / debian, etc. introduced more problems by branching away from the norm than solved them.
or so says some articles I've read. Come on, people. It sort of encompasess the top level perspective vs hands on approach. Once the lower level tools are "stable", it makes sense to create higher level tools that manipulate the lower level tools in convenient automated fashion.
Yes, some creativity is stifled by limiting ones scoop to a set of tools at a certain level. But the gain is the ability to worry about higher level problems. Hopefully this focal shift will lead to an increase in overall productivity.
Ok lets talk specs. Sources are from wiki and sites mentioned in above comments.
CPU: GC = 485 MHz IBM Power PC "Gekko" | WII = (rumored) 729 Mhz IB Power PC 790 FX
So this must be the "1.5" argument. Another poor soul who thinks processing power is the primary component of speed. I think its debatable if it's underpowered, but saying it's 1.5 times as fast is silly because the pipelines, instruction set extensions, materials, and god knows what else affects overall throughput. I have a new amd turion 64 2.0 GHz. My old model was an amd athlon 2.20 GHz. The new one compiles faster...
MEMORY: GC = 40 mg | WII = 512 mb of flash, possibly some other stuff
Well this is over 10 times more, not 1.5 more. And I believe this is a key component to the true perceived speed of this thing (besides the vid card). One thing nintendo seemed smart enough to realize is that new games are going to need a $hit load of memory, pardon my french. People want fast load times in large complex environments. This requires (fast!) memory. READ: memory is often more important than processing power.
Vid Card: from the rage3d rumor mill web site:
***
Revolution's ATI-provided "Hollywood" GPU clocks in at 243MHz. By
comparison, GameCube's GPU ran at 162MHz, while the GPU on the original Xbox was clocked at 233MHz. Sources we spoke with suggest that it is unlikely the GPU will
feature any added shaders, as has been speculated.
"The 'Hollywood' is a large-scale integrated chip that includes the
GPU, DSP, I/O bridge and 3MBs of texture memory," a studio source told
us.
***
So again, we only see small change in processor speed, therefore its just 1.5 times better (sarcasm). Who knows what silly cartoon shading nutty graphics enhancements this video card features?
Why, oh why, did they not release a version for the gamecube? Fire emblem was great, but one good RPG just ain't enough (Crystal Chronicles hardly counts).
I thought Nintendo and Square Enix "resolved their differences"?
Don't forget SML which has a super optimized compiler (mlton.org). It does lack OO design however.
And one more comment, why has no one mentioned C++?
Yes its ugly and a syntactical mess, but it's arguably the most practical language out there. It's multiplatform so that avoids the "windows only" issue. A person teaching C++ to a student can also choose a small subset of its features to keep things initially simple. And any way one wants to mold this future programmer is possible because C++ covers most of the basic design ideas. It's got OO, templates (algorithm driven programming), a full featured STL, functors and it doesn't force garbage collection at the language level. Ideas like const references, const members, pointers, stacks, etc. is an important principle to learn early on.
Having said all this, I like the idea of teaching higher level languages early so programmers don't get too narrow minded. Concepts and design are important and typically high level languages handle these things. Chances are that 20 years in the future many programmers won't have the slightest clue whats happening at the architectural level because it won't matter with the language they use and problems they solve.
Sorry I still don't care. There are much more interesting stories out there. I couldn't care less if some moron upgrades his computer or not. I have no problems with spam whatsoever thanks to gmail. Quantum Computers? AI? Games? Linux? BSD? Now we're talking...
Honestly, this is by far the most uninteresting and useless slashdot headline I've ever seen. I'll take troll hits if necessary. For the love of god, why would I care if someone updates to service pack 2 or not? Christ!
"the number of calls to a support desk grows exponentially with the number of bugs and users. "
Is this true? Can I prove it? Mathemetically, I am "parsing" his statement as
N(B,U) = O(k^f(B,U))
for some constant k and unknown function f(B,U) where N(B,U) is the number of calls given B bugs and U users. Intuitively, I feel that the number of calls should be proportional to the number of bugs times the number of users. The idea being that we can expect some proportion of the users to bitch about each bug some bounded number of times, so N(B,U) = c*d*B*U where c is the proportion of users who will bitch about bugs and d is the maximum number of times they will call about the same bug. This is not exponential of course but insteads scales proportional to B and U. Someone explain what f(B,U) could be to justify this guy's "exponential" claim.
Talking online is not like drinking alcohol, having sex, looking at porn, driving, etc. It's just a textual form of communication- a freedom of speech that utilizes technology. This seems to me like yahoo is just trying to cover their ass and avoid further obnoxious law suits that they shoudn't be responsible for. Frankly children still have a variety of other online chat choices so this act of "vigilance" would hardly put a dent in the "minors talking online" industry (not to mention VOIP and webcams- christ!).
I did a little bit of work recently at UofA with the poker group.
Poker is a hard problem. The game tree is huge for even heads up limit (~ 10^18 leaf nodes).
Ring games (3-10 players) are intractable via
any game theoretic methods. The only feasible
possibilities are searching parts of the game
tree through intelligent sampling methods, and perhaps abstracting the game down a bit.
Work has focused on both solving abstracted versions of the game and exploiting opponent weaknesses. A publication concerning most
recent methods involving bayesian best response
will be available soon at the following link:
Just in case any one was wondering, calculating your raw chances of winning, dubbed "7 card roll out strength" is no problem at all once you harness the versatility of the gnu poker-eval library located on sourceforge.
I poked around the milkdrop code for a while trying to figure out how the evaluator worked. Apparently the equations are compiled on the fly into assembly, which is not even close to the way I am doing it in projectM. My code is just a prefix operator tree, nothing particular fancy. Its a goddamn miracle it runs about as fast as milkdrop seeing as I have significant recursive overhead when doing evaluations.
As for the next feature, I am going to take a look at his smooth preset switching code and hopefully mimic the procedure in projectM.
What you say sounds wonderful, but if the firefox developers asked people to donate money for such personal reasons it will surely fail. The advertisement donation was a very clear goal with immediate and concrete results (i.e., you got an add in an influential newspaper), hence the success of funding.
Back in the day, when IBM and Apple were going at it in the home computer industry, IBM decided to allow other companies to copy their hardware. I am assuming they must have released a significant amount of their propretiary secrets to let this happen. If so, it seems that video card companies could *perhaps* follow a similar principle. Suppose nvidia released their specs -- whose to say their business model would crash? I find it at the very least a speculative argument either way. Please expand on this or refute, slashdotters (i.e., find a google search about IBM's business strategy against Apple to support / deny my claims:)
Granted, any half-decent programmer can write code that mass emails a crap load of people. However, this guy also used proxies to cover his tracks as well statistical graphs and print outs of the program's success. His program is also multithreaded, which by no means is a simple programming concept. He definitely has a pretty good grasp of how write decent code. Additionally, I applaude the fact that he coded it in Unix - good tastes concerning the development platform!
However, its really one of the worst things he could have written. Its a shame he doesn't start / contribute to an opensource project. Moral of the story? He's a waste of talent. Also, why is he looking for a "hacker job" when he could just be a software engineer for a whole variety of companies?
Slashdot Mirror
Advertisements on the web may be the most common way to turn a profit online, but it's certainly not the universe anyone really wanted except for advertising firms. I would gladly pay $5 a month for wikipedia to exist without ads. In fact, I would almost always pay money rather than see ads for any service (as I eventually did on slashdot, incidentally). So perhaps wikipedia should adopt the slashdot model: No ads for special or paying members- everyone else gets non intrusive ads (by special, I mean long term members, frequent contributors, etc.). You could even adopt a system where contributors get "points" which allow them to not see ads.
You guys are both forgetting that as time progresses...
(1) Technology is, and always will be, replacing human labor.
(2) In the United States, outsourcing is getting rid of "lower educated" jobs.
Also, the fact that high fructose corn syrup beverages are less expensive than water doesn't help either.
It's not just the availability of cheap food that leads to higher obesity among the poor. The quality of cheap food (eg. fast food, bread, rice, and questionable canned food) is likely the true cause.
Yeah ... I was thinking the same thing. Good bye to C and Assembler? Ahhh, they mean goodbye to any low level hardware I/O or custom drivers ... nice.
There is an assembler called Phantasm, which would fill the niche you suggest is missing. Of course any alternative to C / assembler is viewed with skepticism due to non plausible coexistence with current systems / hardware.
with sophisticated, synthetic voices and animations.
so I can get Qt or Qtopia running on it and make a sweet little portable device.
Wow, Dr. Thompson is very seriously abusing statistics! For the sake of entertainment, let's analyze a few flaws of the deaths per minute evaluation:
(1) hmmm so a game bent on world domination? How many deaths per minute? Destroying an entire nation, so around 500,000,000?
(2) a game bent on interplanetary warefare: ie. destroying an entire planet?
(3) Time scale...some games move slowly, others jump in years per second! Somehow I doubt Dr. Thompson accounted for this.
Fact is, measuring violence in games accurately is an extremely complex problem. Here's a scientific alternative using some simple AI that has to be *somewhat* better than their approach.
(1) extract a set of simple "features" that may help determine volient / non-violent games and write them down in a list for each game.
(2) Have people rate the violence of each game from 1 to 10 (where 10 = will not allow child to watch, 0 = perfectly safe and innocent for any age)
(3) train a classifier via a standard supervised learning algorithm
Of course, step 1 is a bit difficult and requires human knowledge, but any system where one tries to measure violence will require some human intervention (machines aren't smart enough yet).
The ability to play tetris while it copied packages to disc during installation! That rocked. It was with X as well. In fact, Corel's install easibility was nothing to sneeze at.
In fact, I can't quite ascertain why they never really took off...even I didn't use that it that long. Perhaps Coral's variations from the main stream redhat / debian, etc. introduced more problems by branching away from the norm than solved them.
or so says some articles I've read. Come on, people. It sort of encompasess the top level perspective vs hands on approach. Once the lower level tools are "stable", it makes sense to create higher level tools that manipulate the lower level tools in convenient automated fashion.
Yes, some creativity is stifled by limiting ones scoop to a set of tools at a certain level. But the gain is the ability to worry about higher level problems. Hopefully this focal shift will lead to an increase in overall productivity.
hmm yeah your right...I really hope they do better than 88 MB ram though. If not, it better be lightning fast / integrated/
Curse you slashdot! Removing my "greater than" sign, the main point of my subject line!
Ok lets talk specs. Sources are from wiki and sites mentioned in above comments.
CPU: GC = 485 MHz IBM Power PC "Gekko" | WII = (rumored) 729 Mhz IB Power PC 790 FX
So this must be the "1.5" argument. Another poor soul who thinks processing power is the primary component of speed. I think its debatable if it's underpowered, but saying it's 1.5 times as fast is silly because the pipelines, instruction set extensions, materials, and god knows what else affects overall throughput. I have a new amd turion 64 2.0 GHz. My old model was an amd athlon 2.20 GHz. The new one compiles faster...
MEMORY: GC = 40 mg | WII = 512 mb of flash, possibly some other stuff
Well this is over 10 times more, not 1.5 more. And I believe this is a key component to the true perceived speed of this thing (besides the vid card). One thing nintendo seemed smart enough to realize is that new games are going to need a $hit load of memory, pardon my french. People want fast load times in large complex environments. This requires (fast!) memory. READ: memory is often more important than processing power.
Vid Card: from the rage3d rumor mill web site:
***
Revolution's ATI-provided "Hollywood" GPU clocks in at 243MHz. By comparison, GameCube's GPU ran at 162MHz, while the GPU on the original Xbox was clocked at 233MHz. Sources we spoke with suggest that it is unlikely the GPU will feature any added shaders, as has been speculated. "The 'Hollywood' is a large-scale integrated chip that includes the GPU, DSP, I/O bridge and 3MBs of texture memory," a studio source told us.
***
So again, we only see small change in processor speed, therefore its just 1.5 times better (sarcasm). Who knows what silly cartoon shading nutty graphics enhancements this video card features?
Why, oh why, did they not release a version for the gamecube? Fire emblem was great, but one good RPG just ain't enough (Crystal Chronicles hardly counts). I thought Nintendo and Square Enix "resolved their differences"?
And one more comment, why has no one mentioned C++?
Yes its ugly and a syntactical mess, but it's arguably the most practical language out there. It's multiplatform so that avoids the "windows only" issue. A person teaching C++ to a student can also choose a small subset of its features to keep things initially simple. And any way one wants to mold this future programmer is possible because C++ covers most of the basic design ideas. It's got OO, templates (algorithm driven programming), a full featured STL, functors and it doesn't force garbage collection at the language level. Ideas like const references, const members, pointers, stacks, etc. is an important principle to learn early on.
Having said all this, I like the idea of teaching higher level languages early so programmers don't get too narrow minded. Concepts and design are important and typically high level languages handle these things. Chances are that 20 years in the future many programmers won't have the slightest clue whats happening at the architectural level because it won't matter with the language they use and problems they solve.
Sorry I still don't care. There are much more interesting stories out there. I couldn't care less if some moron upgrades his computer or not. I have no problems with spam whatsoever thanks to gmail. Quantum Computers? AI? Games? Linux? BSD? Now we're talking...
Honestly, this is by far the most uninteresting and useless slashdot headline I've ever seen. I'll take troll hits if necessary. For the love of god, why would I care if someone updates to service pack 2 or not? Christ!
Is this true? Can I prove it? Mathemetically, I am "parsing" his statement as
N(B,U) = O(k^f(B,U))
for some constant k and unknown function f(B,U) where N(B,U) is the number of calls given B bugs and U users. Intuitively, I feel that the number of calls should be proportional to the number of bugs times the number of users. The idea being that we can expect some proportion of the users to bitch about each bug some bounded number of times, so N(B,U) = c*d*B*U where c is the proportion of users who will bitch about bugs and d is the maximum number of times they will call about the same bug. This is not exponential of course but insteads scales proportional to B and U. Someone explain what f(B,U) could be to justify this guy's "exponential" claim.
Talking online is not like drinking alcohol, having sex, looking at porn, driving, etc. It's just a textual form of communication- a freedom of speech that utilizes technology. This seems to me like yahoo is just trying to cover their ass and avoid further obnoxious law suits that they shoudn't be responsible for. Frankly children still have a variety of other online chat choices so this act of "vigilance" would hardly put a dent in the "minors talking online" industry (not to mention VOIP and webcams- christ!).
I did a little bit of work recently at UofA with the poker group.
p ublications.html
Poker is a hard problem. The game tree is huge for even heads up limit (~ 10^18 leaf nodes). Ring games (3-10 players) are intractable via any game theoretic methods. The only feasible possibilities are searching parts of the game tree through intelligent sampling methods, and perhaps abstracting the game down a bit.
Work has focused on both solving abstracted versions of the game and exploiting opponent weaknesses. A publication concerning most recent methods involving bayesian best response will be available soon at the following link:
http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~finnegan/publications/
Just in case any one was wondering, calculating your raw chances of winning, dubbed "7 card roll out strength" is no problem at all once you harness the versatility of the gnu poker-eval library located on sourceforge.
I poked around the milkdrop code for a while trying to figure out how the evaluator worked. Apparently the equations are compiled on the fly into assembly, which is not even close to the way I am doing it in projectM. My code is just a prefix operator tree, nothing particular fancy. Its a goddamn miracle it runs about as fast as milkdrop seeing as I have significant recursive overhead when doing evaluations.
As for the next feature, I am going to take a look at his smooth preset switching code and hopefully mimic the procedure in projectM.
Cheers, CarmeloWhat you say sounds wonderful, but if the firefox developers asked people to donate money for such personal reasons it will surely fail. The advertisement donation was a very clear goal with immediate and concrete results (i.e., you got an add in an influential newspaper), hence the success of funding.
Back in the day, when IBM and Apple were going at it in the home computer industry, IBM decided to allow other companies to copy their hardware. I am assuming they must have released a significant amount of their propretiary secrets to let this happen. If so, it seems that video card companies could *perhaps* follow a similar principle. Suppose nvidia released their specs -- whose to say their business model would crash? I find it at the very least a speculative argument either way. Please expand on this or refute, slashdotters (i.e., find a google search about IBM's business strategy against Apple to support / deny my claims :)
Granted, any half-decent programmer can write code that mass emails a crap load of people. However, this guy also used proxies to cover his tracks as well statistical graphs and print outs of the program's success. His program is also multithreaded, which by no means is a simple programming concept. He definitely has a pretty good grasp of how write decent code. Additionally, I applaude the fact that he coded it in Unix - good tastes concerning the development platform!
However, its really one of the worst things he could have written. Its a shame he doesn't start / contribute to an opensource project. Moral of the story? He's a waste of talent. Also, why is he looking for a "hacker job" when he could just be a software engineer for a whole variety of companies?