Sounds nice, although too rich for my blood at this point (and I think it's overkill for my current needs). Although the downside of the little pushbutton box I recommended is that you have to get up to push the buttons.:-) Back when I was often switching between N64 and Dreamcast, that was more of a pain, but now I only seem to be using the PS2.
How big a difference does component versus composite video make on the PS2? (Or versus S-video for that matter?) My TV has all 3 inputs, but so far I'm still just using the composite cables that came with the PS2. Although if I switch to S-video or component, then I need to send audio through my stereo receiver, which means more remotes I'd have to fumble with whenever I use the PS2. Hmm, that VR-510 may be handy after all...
How about a Slashdot review on how the hell you plug all of these game consoles into your existing video system?
Ok, I guess you were joking, but it's a good question. I've mentioned this here before, but:
For $20, you can get a video/S-video switch (the SVS1000, not the AVS500 on that page) to connect more things to the TV. When I mentioned it a few weeks ago, I had my N64 and Dreamcast hooked up to it. Since then, I also got a PS2 (thanks to Grand Theft Auto 3). So I've still got one more input jack free on mine. As soon as a version of Mario Kart comes out for Gamecube, that'll take care of the last input on my video switch!
Plus, I suppose if you have more than 4 things you want to hook up, you could chain a couple of these switches together, i.e. make the output of one of them be one of the inputs to the other. If you had two switches, you could hook up 7 devices in total. If you had N switches chained together, you could hook up 3N+1 devices.:-) Although don't start whining if you chain 10 of these together and the video quality has decreased...
I have always believed that if we are ever truly successful at creating artificial intelligence or artificial life, we won't understand how it works. If we really understood how it works, we probably wouldn't be able to bring ourselves to call it alive or intelligent.
That's not to say we wouldn't be able to understand some aspects of it, just as we understand some aspects of human intelligence and physiology; but I don't think we can ever completely understand ourselves. That would be like writing a book which contains a complete description of itself, including its contents.
There's a very cool application of genetic algorithms that I saw a few years back. Danny Hillis was trying to evolve sorting networks, a way of representing a sorting algorithm for a fixed number of inputs. (See volume 3 of Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming). He wanted to do it using genetic algorithms, on 16-input sorting networks. The best known one at the time used 60 comparison/swaps to sort 16 inputs.
The problem is, in order to measure the "fitness" of a sorting network, you should give it all possible sets of numbers and see how many it sorts correctly (you also give a fitness bonus to smaller networks). It turns out you just need to give it all possible sets of 0's and 1's to see if it will sort any set of numbers correctly, so Hills would have to test each network on 65,536 inputs to see how well it did.
That would take too long, so he wanted to only test the networks on a subset of possible inputs. The clever thing was he made the particular subset used also evolve, as a kind of "parasite" on the sorting networks. The parasites were "rewarded" (had higher fitness) when they broke sorting networks. That way, the system would keep around precisely those test cases which could break the current population of sorting networks, so it was always focusing the testing exactly on the trouble cases, and ignoring the ones "known" to work, and thus saving a ton of time/effort.
Hillis evolved a sorting network which used 61 comparison-swaps, just 1 away from the best man-made one known. I was at Thinking Machines (Hillis' company) for a while, and fiddled around with this myself a bit, thinking that a bit more simulation must beat the record, but I never did beat it.
Hillis had a paper, called "Co-Evolving Parasites Improve Simulated Evolution as an Optimization Procedure", published in Artificial Life II (Langton et al, editors), Addison Wesley, 1991, pages 313-324. A note in my database indicates it may also have been published in the journal Physica D, vol. 42, p. 228-234.
A search also just turned up Hugues Juille, who has apparently done some more work in this area. He evolved a 60 comparison sorting network for 16 inputs, tying the record. And he broke a (25-year-old) record for 13-input sorting networks, doing it in 45 comparison/swaps.
When I got RedHat 5.0 almost 4 years ago for my laptop, I used fvwm2 with the AnotherLevel macros, which were one of the defaults at the time.
Now, on my latest desktop machines, I still use the same setup (although on a newer version of Linux). I had to copy over my old startup files to get the newer RedHat to fire up a desktop that looks like what I was used to. I also use this on a couple of 486's I have.
With this setup, I get multiple screens if I want, a very thin title bar at the bottom (so it doesn't take up much real estate, very important to me), and I have programmed various function key combinations to warp to (and bring to the foreground) the various windows I use:
F5 goes to my chinese xterm with simplified characters window
F6 goes to my main local terminal window
F7 goes to my second local terminal window
F8 goes to my main terminal window which is logged into my office computer
F9 goes to my netscape window (or the next one, if I have multiple ones open, which I always do)
F10 goes to my emacs window
F11 lowers the current window
Ctrl-Shift-F5 goes to my chinese xterm with traditional characters
Ctrl-Shift-F7 goes to my xdvi window
Ctrl-Shift-F8 goes to my gv window
Ctrl-Shift-F9 goes to my xv window
The sysadmin in my dept laughed when I told him about all that, but a few days later he told me he'd done the same thing, mapping a zillion function keys. Once you use them a bit and remember them, it's so much faster than the mouse (and he probably has about as much aversion to the mouse as I do).
I tried to do all this function key mapping under Gnome a year or two ago, but couldn't figure out how to do it, so I gave up on it. Anyway, the stuff I do works fine under fvwm2 / Another Level, so there's nothing driving me to switch.
My Neighbor Totoro is one of the very few movies I saw where I immediately though "I need to get this on video when it come out". So I got it on video a few years ago. Just a couple of days ago, I suddenly wondered if it was out on DVD now, because if it were I'd buy that, and give my sister my VHS copy for her kid.
This is a very sweet movie, and I think it does a great job at portraying the innocence of childhood, and it's just so darn cute and funny at times. Definitely one of my favorites.
The whole argument about the study being biased leads to a related question of interest: how segregated are the Windows, Mac, and Linux crowds? How much do their web viewing habits overlap? Not only the obvious ones, like Linux folks reading Slashdot and Mac folks reading Mac-related sites. But do e.g. cnn.com and yahoo.com draw similar proportions of Linux people? Do Linux vs Mac people have more overlap in the sites they view than Linux vs Windows people do, or Mac vs Windows people?
It would be interesting to use e.g. some biological measures here. E.g. the Shannon-Weiner diversity index (used to measure species diversity), although that one mainly just measures total diversity, not actual segregation. I suppose even better would be something like the Fst statistic from population genetics, which measures how segregated various subpopulations are.
In the large version of the first photo, near the left it looks like a guy wearing an overcoat and a hat walking to the right, and a wild turkey walking to the left. Both of them are looking down, like they are dejected. Is there more to this story? What just happened?
I was going to buy a Gamecube. (I probably will at some point, if they come out with a MarioKart game for it.)
Last week I had a small video game party for the students in my department. I brought my N64 and hooked it up to the projector in the classroom, hoping to find a worthy opponent at MarioKart. (I had bragged to them during the semester about my MarioKart skills, and even made up a homework problem about it. Unfortunately, no one could beat me.) By the way, I did this after the semester ended, lest anyone think I play N64 during classes.:-)
One of my students brought his Playstation 2. One of the games he brought was Grand Theft Auto 3. The minute the party was over, I was at the mall buying a PS2 and GTA3. It's the first time a game ever made me run out and buy a system.
After reading this comment under the recent story about GTA3 being banned in Australia, I had an idea the game was going to be pretty entertaining. While playing it during the party, I stole a cop car and found a little concrete structure that looked like maybe it could be used as a ramp. I floored it and hit it head on with the cop car, only to be treated with a beautiful cinematic slow-motion side view of the police car sailing over an elevated pedestrian walkway, and then got bonus points for doing an "insane stunt". I was hooked.
You can also steal taxis, and then basically play "Crazy Taxi", picking up fares and bringing them to their destinations. Once when I hijacked a cab, the first fare the game told me to pick up was the taxi driver whose cab I'd just stolen! Damn it is a funny game.
When I found the drug that made me slow down, at first I thought I better avoid everyone, because I was moving so slowly they could kill me easily. Then I found that everyone else was moving even more slowly. I punched someone, and he went flying across the street. I think that was when I knew I was gonna buy this system and game.
So, Nintendo lost a sale from me (or at least delayed it for quite a while) only because of GTA3. If only MarioKart were available for PS2...
Don't worry, thanks to his sudden popularity (and especially that smokin' photo of him), soon he'll be fighting the women off with a stick.
Another book, and Swarm
on
Emergence
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· Score: 3, Informative
Another book on the topic that came out probably almost 10 years ago is "Emergent Computation", edited by Stephanie Forrest. It's out of print now, but I believe it was also published as a special issue of the Physica D journal. It was a conference proceedings. (I used to work at the Center for Nonlinear Studies and Santa Fe Institute, and Forrest was also around at the time.)
By the way, people interested in this stuff may be interested in checking out the Swarm simulation system, a multi-agent simulation environment. Some of the demos that come with it are the ant/pheromone models and so on, which e.g. Resnick also explored in StarLogo.
Marketers won't stop until the ads are as intrusive/disrupting as television ads, where you have to basically stop what you are doing (watching your show) and wait until the advertisement is done.
One problem with that is that I, like many people, operate in a totally different mode on the web; more of a directed high-speed mode where I decide pretty quickly whether or not I want to read a page. If I have to wait more than a few seconds before seeing the actual content because of ads, I'll say screw it (unless I really have high expectations about what may finally be there), it's not worth the time. If I had to wait for 10 seconds of advertisements per web page I glanced at in a day, it would add up to some serious lengths of time.
(Actually, even with TV, there are only a few shows that I watch "live"; I usually tape stuff and watch it later, fast-forwarding through commercials, although I do stop and watch commercials that seem interesting. Yeah, I need to get a Tivo.)
Once web advertising has caught up to TV, they won't stop there. They'll come up with something even worse. E.g. you know those tests that humans are supposed to be able to pass, but computers aren't, to avoid having robots get into certain sections of web site, or to prevent computers from automatically enter on-line polls, etc.? (Someone mentioned it in a comment recently, but I can't find it now.) Well, soon you'll have to take a quiz about the ad that just went by in your browser, to make sure you paid attention to it. Or they'll start using product placement like they do in movies and some TV shows. You'll read an interview which says something like "CEO Jack Nife stopped to ponder the question, while sipping his Dr. Pepper and eating a Fig Newton, before replying `We had to lay off 2,000 people so that the other 5 of us could keep our jobs. It's better for everyone in the long run.'"
Two very simple but practical suggestions for geeks who already have a lot of toys spread all over their home (I got both for myself during the past year, and they've helped me clean up my living room a bit, and were well worth it):
First, the cheap one: a $20 video/S-video switch (the SVS1000, not the AVS500 on that page) to connect more things to the TV. I've got my N64 and Dreamcast going through it, and will probably also route one or two of my VCRs through it. Simple but handy. But a warning: if you give one to an uber-geek he may complain that the box degrades the video quality noticeably; I didn't notice any image degradation at all with Mario Kart 64, which was my main concern. I just picked up one of these when I bought a Dreamcast after they came down to $50, since my TV didn't have any more free inputs.
Second, and much more expensive, a KVM switch, to share one keyboard/monitor/mouse among multiple computers. I got myself a Belkin OmniView SE 4-port (they claim list price around $260, but I'm pretty sure I got mine quite a bit cheaper) and I'm really happy to have reclaimed so much room on my desk; now I'm able to pile up so many more papers than before!
Lately when Christmas approaches, I've started wondering where I can make room for any more stuff I get. These two things have given me a bit of extra room and helped me organize all the wires a bit.
I occasionally stop to wonder, and think back to the pre-spam days of the internet, and then to the future... We are in the middle of quite an intense evolutionary arms race, the spammers versus the anti-spammers. Whenever the anti-spammers come up with a new trick, the spammers find another way around it.
What is this system going to look like in another 20 or 50 years? What percentage of general computational resources are going to be devoted to the spam/anti-spam war? Do any of you think any radical revolutionary changes will come along, or the battle will pretty much proceed as it is, just continuing the one-upmanship ad infinitum?
It's kind of sad, but I and a housemate have played SSB on N64 probably about an hour a day (average) over the last year and a half.
My girlfriend and I average about an hour a day on Mario Kart 64... it never gets old. But it's spoiled me against playing other games. Whenever I pop some other cartridge in, I just keep wanting to go back to Mario Kart. It is a dangerously addictive game, and ought to come with a government warning label or something.
I'm highly considering buying the dreamcast... what a steal for $50!!!!!
I finally picked up a Dreamcast at Best Buy a few days ago. It was only $40! (Well, it's $50, but they include a game; and the way they do it is mark down the machine to $40, and then charge you $8 for the game.) I'd say that's a pretty good deal. I'm glad I didn't buy one when the price came down to $100 a while ago, since I had been thinking about it.
I used to use a program called cxterm (Chinese xterm) under RedHat 5. It was very nice, and had pretty good input methods (based on pinyin, but it would guess the latter characters in multi-character phrases). I even wrote some software for doing Chinese vocabulary lookups in emacs, which worked great in cxterm.
Unfortunately, cxterm stopped working under RedHat 6. I tried many times to get it working, but haven't been able to (I think it's a problem with termcap stuff, or the newer equivalent of termcap, which I never really understood).
Unfortunately, the Linux Chinese HOWTO hasn't been updated for more than 3 years now. There are other methods of doing Chinese in Linux listed there, but I haven't gotten any of them working.
I basically keep my old laptop running RedHat 5, and fire up cxterm on that when I need to write Chinese. One of these days when I've got enough time, I really hope I can get cxterm working under newer Linux releases...
Speaking of rates, is there somewhere I could get a list of the times of observed meteors? (Is there anywhere that has data like those available?) It doesn't have to be super-professional data; anyone who happened to record the times they observed meteors would do.
I was tempted to bring my laptop when I was out watching them, to record such data, but finally decided not to, mainly because I was cold and sleepy.:-) But I'm teaching Poisson processes in my class, and meteor observations was one of the examples I gave them several weeks ago. It'd be great to have some actual data to look at. (I've already gathered some automobile traffic data for them to analyze.)
Re:In no way do videogames constitute art
on
Are Videogames Art?
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· Score: 1
Take a good computer game, rip out the story. Place that story in book form. If that book in any way can be considered art (or literature), why isn't the game art?
And similarly for the visual aspect of the game. Take some images from the game, forget about the story behind it and the action. If it's something beautiful or interesting or thought-provoking or emotion-inducing or something you'd like to hang on your wall, then that's a kind of art too. There are some images in games that I think would make nice pictures to hang on the wall (especially when rendered at higher resolutions).
Never admit to sysadmin knowledge, or you will be marked for life.
Amen to that. It can take years to shake a reputation as "someone who knows something about computers". And as many of you know, once you get that reputation among relatives, you're stuck with it for life. Whenever I go visit my parents, I get dragged around to fix all their friends' computers.
At work, there is a very fine line that I usually try to walk. I need people to believe that I know enough about computers that I'm allowed to do a little bit of administration on my own machine (to set up various little things the way I want, e.g. adding some domains to/etc/resolv.conf, or putting some default flags in various system files), but not let them think I know so much that they come to me with questions all the time.
Hey, I'm not at all ashamed of sex, just wouldn't want my name on jiz.biz. I don't think there's anything wrong with online commerce, either, but I also don't want a.biz address. Like many other people, I don't see the point in.biz, think it sounds unprofessional, will get people confused when they can't remember if an address is.com or.biz, and think it's probably a ploy just to get more money from people with.com addresses who will also register the.biz version.
Great! Now that people are dumping broadband, there will be growing demand for low-bandwidth porn. Sure, there's ASCII porn, but that's not in color...
I showed one of my professors the Computer Algebra System on my HP49g earlier this semester... It caused him a small paradigm shift.
Yeah, that's exactly why I tend to not let my students use calculators during exams. My philosophy used to be "as long as your calculator doesn't make the lights go dim when you turn it on, it's fine". But now, the good calculators can do symbolic integration, matrix computations, etc. I think it gives students with the fancy calculators too much of an advantage over the poor students or those who just didn't spend the bucks on one. In my classes, they need to show that they really understand what the calculator is doing. After they finish my class, then they can let their calculator do the gruntwork for them.
Slashdot Mirror
(Kenwood VR-510 for $399 + shipping)
:-) Back when I was often switching between N64 and Dreamcast, that was more of a pain, but now I only seem to be using the PS2.
Sounds nice, although too rich for my blood at this point (and I think it's overkill for my current needs). Although the downside of the little pushbutton box I recommended is that you have to get up to push the buttons.
How big a difference does component versus composite video make on the PS2? (Or versus S-video for that matter?) My TV has all 3 inputs, but so far I'm still just using the composite cables that came with the PS2. Although if I switch to S-video or component, then I need to send audio through my stereo receiver, which means more remotes I'd have to fumble with whenever I use the PS2. Hmm, that VR-510 may be handy after all...
How about a Slashdot review on how the hell you plug all of these game consoles into your existing video system?
:-) Although don't start whining if you chain 10 of these together and the video quality has decreased...
Ok, I guess you were joking, but it's a good question. I've mentioned this here before, but:
For $20, you can get a video/S-video switch (the SVS1000, not the AVS500 on that page) to connect more things to the TV. When I mentioned it a few weeks ago, I had my N64 and Dreamcast hooked up to it. Since then, I also got a PS2 (thanks to Grand Theft Auto 3). So I've still got one more input jack free on mine. As soon as a version of Mario Kart comes out for Gamecube, that'll take care of the last input on my video switch!
Plus, I suppose if you have more than 4 things you want to hook up, you could chain a couple of these switches together, i.e. make the output of one of them be one of the inputs to the other. If you had two switches, you could hook up 7 devices in total. If you had N switches chained together, you could hook up 3N+1 devices.
I have always believed that if we are ever truly successful at creating artificial intelligence or artificial life, we won't understand how it works. If we really understood how it works, we probably wouldn't be able to bring ourselves to call it alive or intelligent.
That's not to say we wouldn't be able to understand some aspects of it, just as we understand some aspects of human intelligence and physiology; but I don't think we can ever completely understand ourselves. That would be like writing a book which contains a complete description of itself, including its contents.
There's a very cool application of genetic algorithms that I saw a few years back. Danny Hillis was trying to evolve sorting networks, a way of representing a sorting algorithm for a fixed number of inputs. (See volume 3 of Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming). He wanted to do it using genetic algorithms, on 16-input sorting networks. The best known one at the time used 60 comparison/swaps to sort 16 inputs.
The problem is, in order to measure the "fitness" of a sorting network, you should give it all possible sets of numbers and see how many it sorts correctly (you also give a fitness bonus to smaller networks). It turns out you just need to give it all possible sets of 0's and 1's to see if it will sort any set of numbers correctly, so Hills would have to test each network on 65,536 inputs to see how well it did.
That would take too long, so he wanted to only test the networks on a subset of possible inputs. The clever thing was he made the particular subset used also evolve, as a kind of "parasite" on the sorting networks. The parasites were "rewarded" (had higher fitness) when they broke sorting networks. That way, the system would keep around precisely those test cases which could break the current population of sorting networks, so it was always focusing the testing exactly on the trouble cases, and ignoring the ones "known" to work, and thus saving a ton of time/effort.
Hillis evolved a sorting network which used 61 comparison-swaps, just 1 away from the best man-made one known. I was at Thinking Machines (Hillis' company) for a while, and fiddled around with this myself a bit, thinking that a bit more simulation must beat the record, but I never did beat it.
Hillis had a paper, called "Co-Evolving Parasites Improve Simulated Evolution as an Optimization Procedure", published in Artificial Life II (Langton et al, editors), Addison Wesley, 1991, pages 313-324. A note in my database indicates it may also have been published in the journal Physica D, vol. 42, p. 228-234.
A search also just turned up Hugues Juille, who has apparently done some more work in this area. He evolved a 60 comparison sorting network for 16 inputs, tying the record. And he broke a (25-year-old) record for 13-input sorting networks, doing it in 45 comparison/swaps.
Now, on my latest desktop machines, I still use the same setup (although on a newer version of Linux). I had to copy over my old startup files to get the newer RedHat to fire up a desktop that looks like what I was used to. I also use this on a couple of 486's I have.
With this setup, I get multiple screens if I want, a very thin title bar at the bottom (so it doesn't take up much real estate, very important to me), and I have programmed various function key combinations to warp to (and bring to the foreground) the various windows I use:
The sysadmin in my dept laughed when I told him about all that, but a few days later he told me he'd done the same thing, mapping a zillion function keys. Once you use them a bit and remember them, it's so much faster than the mouse (and he probably has about as much aversion to the mouse as I do).
I tried to do all this function key mapping under Gnome a year or two ago, but couldn't figure out how to do it, so I gave up on it. Anyway, the stuff I do works fine under fvwm2 / Another Level, so there's nothing driving me to switch.
My Neighbor Totoro is one of the very few movies I saw where I immediately though "I need to get this on video when it come out". So I got it on video a few years ago. Just a couple of days ago, I suddenly wondered if it was out on DVD now, because if it were I'd buy that, and give my sister my VHS copy for her kid.
This is a very sweet movie, and I think it does a great job at portraying the innocence of childhood, and it's just so darn cute and funny at times. Definitely one of my favorites.
The whole argument about the study being biased leads to a related question of interest: how segregated are the Windows, Mac, and Linux crowds? How much do their web viewing habits overlap? Not only the obvious ones, like Linux folks reading Slashdot and Mac folks reading Mac-related sites. But do e.g. cnn.com and yahoo.com draw similar proportions of Linux people? Do Linux vs Mac people have more overlap in the sites they view than Linux vs Windows people do, or Mac vs Windows people?
It would be interesting to use e.g. some biological measures here. E.g. the Shannon-Weiner diversity index (used to measure species diversity), although that one mainly just measures total diversity, not actual segregation. I suppose even better would be something like the Fst statistic from population genetics, which measures how segregated various subpopulations are.
In the large version of the first photo, near the left it looks like a guy wearing an overcoat and a hat walking to the right, and a wild turkey walking to the left. Both of them are looking down, like they are dejected. Is there more to this story? What just happened?
I was going to buy a Gamecube. (I probably will at some point, if they come out with a MarioKart game for it.)
:-)
Last week I had a small video game party for the students in my department. I brought my N64 and hooked it up to the projector in the classroom, hoping to find a worthy opponent at MarioKart. (I had bragged to them during the semester about my MarioKart skills, and even made up a homework problem about it. Unfortunately, no one could beat me.) By the way, I did this after the semester ended, lest anyone think I play N64 during classes.
One of my students brought his Playstation 2. One of the games he brought was Grand Theft Auto 3. The minute the party was over, I was at the mall buying a PS2 and GTA3. It's the first time a game ever made me run out and buy a system.
After reading this comment under the recent story about GTA3 being banned in Australia, I had an idea the game was going to be pretty entertaining. While playing it during the party, I stole a cop car and found a little concrete structure that looked like maybe it could be used as a ramp. I floored it and hit it head on with the cop car, only to be treated with a beautiful cinematic slow-motion side view of the police car sailing over an elevated pedestrian walkway, and then got bonus points for doing an "insane stunt". I was hooked.
You can also steal taxis, and then basically play "Crazy Taxi", picking up fares and bringing them to their destinations. Once when I hijacked a cab, the first fare the game told me to pick up was the taxi driver whose cab I'd just stolen! Damn it is a funny game.
When I found the drug that made me slow down, at first I thought I better avoid everyone, because I was moving so slowly they could kill me easily. Then I found that everyone else was moving even more slowly. I punched someone, and he went flying across the street. I think that was when I knew I was gonna buy this system and game.
So, Nintendo lost a sale from me (or at least delayed it for quite a while) only because of GTA3. If only MarioKart were available for PS2...
Chuck buddy... you are in dire need of a woman.
Don't worry, thanks to his sudden popularity (and especially that smokin' photo of him), soon he'll be fighting the women off with a stick.
Another book on the topic that came out probably almost 10 years ago is "Emergent Computation", edited by Stephanie Forrest. It's out of print now, but I believe it was also published as a special issue of the Physica D journal. It was a conference proceedings. (I used to work at the Center for Nonlinear Studies and Santa Fe Institute, and Forrest was also around at the time.)
By the way, people interested in this stuff may be interested in checking out the Swarm simulation system, a multi-agent simulation environment. Some of the demos that come with it are the ant/pheromone models and so on, which e.g. Resnick also explored in StarLogo.
Marketers won't stop until the ads are as intrusive/disrupting as television ads, where you have to basically stop what you are doing (watching your show) and wait until the advertisement is done.
One problem with that is that I, like many people, operate in a totally different mode on the web; more of a directed high-speed mode where I decide pretty quickly whether or not I want to read a page. If I have to wait more than a few seconds before seeing the actual content because of ads, I'll say screw it (unless I really have high expectations about what may finally be there), it's not worth the time. If I had to wait for 10 seconds of advertisements per web page I glanced at in a day, it would add up to some serious lengths of time.
(Actually, even with TV, there are only a few shows that I watch "live"; I usually tape stuff and watch it later, fast-forwarding through commercials, although I do stop and watch commercials that seem interesting. Yeah, I need to get a Tivo.)
Once web advertising has caught up to TV, they won't stop there. They'll come up with something even worse. E.g. you know those tests that humans are supposed to be able to pass, but computers aren't, to avoid having robots get into certain sections of web site, or to prevent computers from automatically enter on-line polls, etc.? (Someone mentioned it in a comment recently, but I can't find it now.) Well, soon you'll have to take a quiz about the ad that just went by in your browser, to make sure you paid attention to it. Or they'll start using product placement like they do in movies and some TV shows. You'll read an interview which says something like "CEO Jack Nife stopped to ponder the question, while sipping his Dr. Pepper and eating a Fig Newton, before replying `We had to lay off 2,000 people so that the other 5 of us could keep our jobs. It's better for everyone in the long run.'"
Two very simple but practical suggestions for geeks who already have a lot of toys spread all over their home (I got both for myself during the past year, and they've helped me clean up my living room a bit, and were well worth it):
First, the cheap one: a $20
video/S-video switch (the SVS1000, not the AVS500 on that page) to connect more things to the TV. I've got my N64 and Dreamcast going through it, and will probably also route one or two of my VCRs through it. Simple but handy. But a warning: if you give one to an uber-geek he may complain that the box degrades the video quality noticeably; I didn't notice any image degradation at all with Mario Kart 64, which was my main concern. I just picked up one of these when I bought a Dreamcast after they came down to $50, since my TV didn't have any more free inputs.
Second, and much more expensive, a KVM switch, to share one keyboard/monitor/mouse among multiple computers. I got myself a Belkin OmniView SE 4-port (they claim list price around $260, but I'm pretty sure I got mine quite a bit cheaper) and I'm really happy to have reclaimed so much room on my desk; now I'm able to pile up so many more papers than before!
Lately when Christmas approaches, I've started wondering where I can make room for any more stuff I get. These two things have given me a bit of extra room and helped me organize all the wires a bit.
I occasionally stop to wonder, and think back to the pre-spam days of the internet, and then to the future... We are in the middle of quite an intense evolutionary arms race, the spammers versus the anti-spammers. Whenever the anti-spammers come up with a new trick, the spammers find another way around it.
What is this system going to look like in another 20 or 50 years? What percentage of general computational resources are going to be devoted to the spam/anti-spam war? Do any of you think any radical revolutionary changes will come along, or the battle will pretty much proceed as it is, just continuing the one-upmanship ad infinitum?
It's kind of sad, but I and a housemate have played SSB on N64 probably about an hour a day (average) over the last year and a half.
My girlfriend and I average about an hour a day on Mario Kart 64... it never gets old. But it's spoiled me against playing other games. Whenever I pop some other cartridge in, I just keep wanting to go back to Mario Kart. It is a dangerously addictive game, and ought to come with a government warning label or something.
I'm highly considering buying the dreamcast... what a steal for $50!!!!!
I finally picked up a Dreamcast at Best Buy a few days ago. It was only $40! (Well, it's $50, but they include a game; and the way they do it is mark down the machine to $40, and then charge you $8 for the game.) I'd say that's a pretty good deal. I'm glad I didn't buy one when the price came down to $100 a while ago, since I had been thinking about it.
I used to use a program called cxterm (Chinese xterm) under RedHat 5. It was very nice, and had pretty good input methods (based on pinyin, but it would guess the latter characters in multi-character phrases). I even wrote some software for doing Chinese vocabulary lookups in emacs, which worked great in cxterm.
Unfortunately, cxterm stopped working under RedHat 6. I tried many times to get it working, but haven't been able to (I think it's a problem with termcap stuff, or the newer equivalent of termcap, which I never really understood).
Unfortunately, the Linux Chinese HOWTO hasn't been updated for more than 3 years now. There are other methods of doing Chinese in Linux listed there, but I haven't gotten any of them working.
I basically keep my old laptop running RedHat 5, and fire up cxterm on that when I need to write Chinese. One of these days when I've got enough time, I really hope I can get cxterm working under newer Linux releases...
Speaking of rates, is there somewhere I could get a list of the times of observed meteors? (Is there anywhere that has data like those available?) It doesn't have to be super-professional data; anyone who happened to record the times they observed meteors would do.
:-) But I'm teaching Poisson processes in my class, and meteor observations was one of the examples I gave them several weeks ago. It'd be great to have some actual data to look at. (I've already gathered some automobile traffic data for them to analyze.)
I was tempted to bring my laptop when I was out watching them, to record such data, but finally decided not to, mainly because I was cold and sleepy.
Take a good computer game, rip out the story. Place that story in book form. If that book in any way can be considered art (or literature), why isn't the game art?
And similarly for the visual aspect of the game. Take some images from the game, forget about the story behind it and the action. If it's something beautiful or interesting or thought-provoking or emotion-inducing or something you'd like to hang on your wall, then that's a kind of art too. There are some images in games that I think would make nice pictures to hang on the wall (especially when rendered at higher resolutions).
Never admit to sysadmin knowledge, or you will be marked for life.
/etc/resolv.conf, or putting some default flags in various system files), but not let them think I know so much that they come to me with questions all the time.
Amen to that. It can take years to shake a reputation as "someone who knows something about computers". And as many of you know, once you get that reputation among relatives, you're stuck with it for life. Whenever I go visit my parents, I get dragged around to fix all their friends' computers.
At work, there is a very fine line that I usually try to walk. I need people to believe that I know enough about computers that I'm allowed to do a little bit of administration on my own machine (to set up various little things the way I want, e.g. adding some domains to
Sex is nothing to be ashamed of you prude.
.biz address. Like many other people, I don't see the point in .biz, think it sounds unprofessional, will get people confused when they can't remember if an address is.com or .biz, and think it's probably a ploy just to get more money from people with .com addresses who will also register the .biz version.
Hey, I'm not at all ashamed of sex, just wouldn't want my name on jiz.biz. I don't think there's anything wrong with online commerce, either, but I also don't want a
Great! Now that people are dumping broadband, there will be growing demand for low-bandwidth porn. Sure, there's ASCII porn, but that's not in color...
I'm waiting for .jiz for all the porn sites I frequent.
Well, for now, someone could register jiz.biz, although would you really want your name as part of the registration records for that domain?
I showed one of my professors the Computer Algebra System on my HP49g earlier this semester... It caused him a small paradigm shift.
Yeah, that's exactly why I tend to not let my students use calculators during exams. My philosophy used to be "as long as your calculator doesn't make the lights go dim when you turn it on, it's fine". But now, the good calculators can do symbolic integration, matrix computations, etc. I think it gives students with the fancy calculators too much of an advantage over the poor students or those who just didn't spend the bucks on one. In my classes, they need to show that they really understand what the calculator is doing. After they finish my class, then they can let their calculator do the gruntwork for them.
Why are they suing Replay instead of Tivo? Ostensibly because Replay has a "commercial advance" button that lets you skip forward thirty seconds.
But plenty of VCRs have a button that does exactly the same thing. Apparently those are still flying below the radar of the networks' legal teams?