It appears I'm conditioned about the same as you. What came to my mind upon reading the headline was the sentence "Thank you for making a simple door very happy."
For classics, I prefer Everyman's Library. They're hardcovers and contain a usually very interesting introduction and a timeline of the author's life along with important events in literature and history. The latter alone is worth the time to pick these up a library.
You still have to tell the computer what to prove. Much of what mathematicians do is finding the right concepts and formulating propositions. Then you can try to prove these propositions.
A fairly basic example: several centuries passed between Newton and Leibniz introducing derivatives and Cauchy and Weierstraß arriving at the formulation that's taught in high schools nowadays (at least where I live): epsilon-delta definition of the limit and going from there. Today, this stuff and the accompanying proofs look pretty simple (and they are), but without the right formalism/mental model, playing with infinitesimal quantities is somewhat of a black art. It took a long time to get there, and computers wouldn't have helped much.
Oops went against the slashdot groupthink... bye bye karma
Take a look around: Complaining about Slashdot groupthink has been thoroughly assimilated. It's become so much part of the groupthink that you'll see it in every discussion and it won't cost or gain you much karma.
(Let's see how long it takes for meta-complaining to be assimilated.)
you might have saved yourself years of grief by spending a few more seconds in the installer. You can deselect Clippy and friends, even individually (in case you just have a Clippy complex, but find the other ones quite helpful).
In my experience, the most irritating features of Word (to people not used to hunting through the options dialog boxes) are the various AutoThingumajigs that magically replace lines starting with just the right pattern into enumerated lists etc. during text entry. Clippy is just annoying, but it doesn't make these folks feel as helpless as these features do.
It's just the M$ way of _not_ betting the farm on x86... which is the true point of.NET
That was also the true point of NT (remember NT running on Alpha and PPC?), according to some guys a decade ago. Support for non-Intel platforms was nixed just in time for the first version of NT that reached significant market share. (They're not stupid at M$, they just like *MONEY*!)
This will probably be the first version of Windows where there is very little incentive to upgrade from the previous version for most of Microsoft's users.
The first since ME, that is. Did anybody upgrade to ME who had a running 98SE (or even NT) installation? I know people who installed Windows 98 on their shiny new computers that came with ME, but none who upgraded 98 to ME.
Consider yourself lucky for having teachers who know how to use technology. When I was in highschool, there were a few teachers who didn't even know how to use an overhead projector effectively! In university, there were folks who just read off their powerpoint slides. That was when I learned to appreciate lecturers who used the chalkboard for explaining stuff (especially mathematics) and turned on the heavy machinery only for visualizations.
It took a guest lecture of a nobel laureate to convince me that there are legitimate uses of color in mathematical formulae on overhead slides. That, and a great lecturer who worked heavily with Mathematica notebooks he modified and evaluated in-class, made me rethink my somewhat fundamentalist attitude to computers in class. The technology is not bad per se, but instead of enhancing the learning experience it's too often used to save time, work or money (in the extreme case replacing teacher time by CBT; I very much agree with Andrew Cumming's CAL rant on this).
I don't know what's dancing in some lawyers' minds, but there were probably a few more copies of The Jesus Incident and Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars books sold because they were inspiration for SMAC's setting and story, and because Brian Reynolds openly says so in the manual (Suggested reading, pp. 221-3). I had never heard of the Pandora books until then, and probably wouldn't have since, if it weren't for Alpha Centauri.
The way he uses the description "quasi Darwinian" makes me think he either doesn't get Darwin or the Wikipedia. There is not a population of articles on the same subject competing for attention.
While his formulation implies article quality is governed by some kind of genetic algorithm, my view of the process is that it's analogous to simulated annealing, which leads to a more modest (but substantiated) claim: the probability of an article being crap decreases monotonically. (And this is not refuted by a single article with deteriorating quality).
This weaker claim of course means that it's not wise to rely on Wikipedia as an authoritative source. OTOH, I don't have significantly higher hopes when using a print encyclopedia.
(And some helpful editor could have told the fellow that it's not slashdot.com.)
Movies inspired by books (as opposed to slavishly following the
book) are not a bad thing in itself. Although I can't name a movie that
proves the opposite, here are two computer games that IMHO pulled it off:
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. Inspired by Red Mars (spaceship crew on the
way to a distant planet splits up into factions; some of the factions in
the game do have similarities to those in the book) und Frank Herbert's
Pandora books (of which I've read "The Jesus Incident" and "The Lazarus
Effect": planet to be colonized turns out to have an extremely
nasty biosphere and a planetwide consciousness that tries to communicate
with the colonists via some sort of telepathy). The game doesn't follow
the plot of these books, just lifted some cool ideas. And it is a nice
turn-based strategy game on its own.
The two Gateway adventures (Legend entertainment, early 90s).
Inspired by Fred Pohl's "Gateway". Yes, they licensed the book, but
didn't just take the book and dropped some gratuitous puzzles into
it (like the "Indiana Jones and the last crusade" movie to adventure
conversion). What they took is the setting of the book, which is pretty
cool: Orbiting the sun in some weird off-ecliptic orbit is an abandonded
alien space station, and apparently has been for the last few hundred
thousand years. Within that station are a few thousand faster-than-light
spacecraft with preprogrammed courses. Riding one of these craft is a
lottery: It could take you right into a star or to some place with
interesting alien artifacts.
This is basically where the plot in the book ends, as the hero spends most of the book in automated psychotherapy (think doctor.el
with holographic output) coming to terms with what happened on his
last trip out.
The games turn this into a wild "save the galaxy from an evil cyborg
race" affair, but do so tastefully. There are lots of little details
that do have counterparts in the book. The VR gear that drives the
book's automated psychotherapy plays a central role in some puzzles
in the first game, where you have to crash the simulation (from
within) by causing an "out of memory. too many objects in the world"
type of error. At one point, you first have to realize that you
are in a simulation -- definitely one of the great moments in adventure
gaming.
Both games are not straight conversions of the books, but inspired by
them, and they do not suck. (And for "The Jesus Incident" and "Gateway",
I cannot imagine a straight conversion that does not suck.)
I do think that it is possible to do great movies inspired by books, and
that there are some. But I'm pretty sure that Hollywood blockbusters
having the same title as a book that's a classic (at least in some
subculture) have a pretty slim chance of being among them.
Henry is a sung hero: In Vernor Vinge's "A fire upon the deep", there is a poster to the "net of a million lies" (basically a galaxy-wide Usenet with surprisingly little spam) called "Sandor Arbitration Intelligence at the Zoo".
At the time, Henry's address was @zoo.toronto.edu. When you look though the rec.arts.sf.* archives, there seems to be general consensus that Henry is Sandor at the Zoo.
...self-destructing. One thing that free markets are exceptionally bad at is maintaining a free market. Because for the individual player, a free market is a really uncomfortable place.
I don't think you should worry. [...] You have no obligation to care about this country's ridiculous IP laws.
Sadly, this is very, very wrong as the US are armtwisting the rest of the planet into doing business their way. Successfully. Europe and Australia have their DMCA now, chances of outlawing software patents in Europe are pretty dim. Others will follow. Except China, perhaps -- my impression is that they are a dictatorship with leaders who actually know what they're doing.
Virtual Desktop Manager, part of the Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP. Sadly, it doesn't add a system menu entry to send a window to a different desktop, but apart from that it's quite servicable.
Bad examples. Thief engine games (Dark Project, Metal Age, System Shock 2) require a lot of futzing around to get working on XP with contemporary video cards. What you meant was probably "...I'll be keeping my Windows 98 box with TNT2 graphics for that purpose". Which is about the same as keeping your Sega Genesis around because you liked the games and has nothing to do with Linux being ready for the desktop or not.
I loved how they actually did some sort of promo for a product that the record company couldn't make any money off -- performing Cash Car Star on Jay Leno's Tonight Show. Being one of the more mass-compatible songs on Machina II, it probably would have done pretty good as a single.
Slashdot Mirror
It appears I'm conditioned about the same as you. What came to my mind upon reading the headline was the sentence "Thank you for making a simple door very happy."
My first encounter with Plan 9 and Ed Wood was the early-90s adventure game (which is *not* based on the movie's plot).
For classics, I prefer Everyman's Library. They're hardcovers and contain a usually very interesting introduction and a timeline of the author's life along with important events in literature and history. The latter alone is worth the time to pick these up a library.
Feels like this new Google feature is just an expanded version of Norvig's ELIZA recreation from his (great) book Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming.
A fairly basic example: several centuries passed between Newton and Leibniz introducing derivatives and Cauchy and Weierstraß arriving at the formulation that's taught in high schools nowadays (at least where I live): epsilon-delta definition of the limit and going from there. Today, this stuff and the accompanying proofs look pretty simple (and they are), but without the right formalism/mental model, playing with infinitesimal quantities is somewhat of a black art. It took a long time to get there, and computers wouldn't have helped much.
Take a look around: Complaining about Slashdot groupthink has been thoroughly assimilated. It's become so much part of the groupthink that you'll see it in every discussion and it won't cost or gain you much karma.
(Let's see how long it takes for meta-complaining to be assimilated.)
Dear PMJ2kx,
you might have saved yourself years of grief by spending a few more seconds in the installer. You can deselect Clippy and friends, even individually (in case you just have a Clippy complex, but find the other ones quite helpful).
In my experience, the most irritating features of Word (to people not used to hunting through the options dialog boxes) are the various AutoThingumajigs that magically replace lines starting with just the right pattern into enumerated lists etc. during text entry. Clippy is just annoying, but it doesn't make these folks feel as helpless as these features do.
That was also the true point of NT (remember NT running on Alpha and PPC?), according to some guys a decade ago. Support for non-Intel platforms was nixed just in time for the first version of NT that reached significant market share. (They're not stupid at M$, they just like *MONEY*!)
The first since ME, that is. Did anybody upgrade to ME who had a running 98SE (or even NT) installation? I know people who installed Windows 98 on their shiny new computers that came with ME, but none who upgraded 98 to ME.
It took a guest lecture of a nobel laureate to convince me that there are legitimate uses of color in mathematical formulae on overhead slides. That, and a great lecturer who worked heavily with Mathematica notebooks he modified and evaluated in-class, made me rethink my somewhat fundamentalist attitude to computers in class. The technology is not bad per se, but instead of enhancing the learning experience it's too often used to save time, work or money (in the extreme case replacing teacher time by CBT; I very much agree with Andrew Cumming's CAL rant on this).
one wonders how they could get along commerce, taxes and precise civil engineering calculations with this method
I'm not an expert in the history of calculating machines, but my first guess would be "abacus".
The co-author's name is Bill Ransom.
I don't know what's dancing in some lawyers' minds, but there were probably a few more copies of The Jesus Incident and Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars books sold because they were inspiration for SMAC's setting and story, and because Brian Reynolds openly says so in the manual (Suggested reading, pp. 221-3). I had never heard of the Pandora books until then, and probably wouldn't have since, if it weren't for Alpha Centauri.
That, my friend, is a morphological error.
While his formulation implies article quality is governed by some kind of genetic algorithm, my view of the process is that it's analogous to simulated annealing, which leads to a more modest (but substantiated) claim: the probability of an article being crap decreases monotonically. (And this is not refuted by a single article with deteriorating quality).
This weaker claim of course means that it's not wise to rely on Wikipedia as an authoritative source. OTOH, I don't have significantly higher hopes when using a print encyclopedia.
(And some helpful editor could have told the fellow that it's not slashdot.com.)
Well, except perhaps Bob Bates's Eric the Unready. Hey, it even features a cameo appearance of a relative of Monkey Island's used ship salesman!
-
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. Inspired by Red Mars (spaceship crew on the
way to a distant planet splits up into factions; some of the factions in
the game do have similarities to those in the book) und Frank Herbert's
Pandora books (of which I've read "The Jesus Incident" and "The Lazarus
Effect": planet to be colonized turns out to have an extremely
nasty biosphere and a planetwide consciousness that tries to communicate
with the colonists via some sort of telepathy). The game doesn't follow
the plot of these books, just lifted some cool ideas. And it is a nice
turn-based strategy game on its own.
-
The two Gateway adventures (Legend entertainment, early 90s).
Inspired by Fred Pohl's "Gateway". Yes, they licensed the book, but
didn't just take the book and dropped some gratuitous puzzles into
it (like the "Indiana Jones and the last crusade" movie to adventure
conversion). What they took is the setting of the book, which is pretty
cool: Orbiting the sun in some weird off-ecliptic orbit is an abandonded
alien space station, and apparently has been for the last few hundred
thousand years. Within that station are a few thousand faster-than-light
spacecraft with preprogrammed courses. Riding one of these craft is a
lottery: It could take you right into a star or to some place with
interesting alien artifacts.
Both games are not straight conversions of the books, but inspired by them, and they do not suck. (And for "The Jesus Incident" and "Gateway", I cannot imagine a straight conversion that does not suck.)This is basically where the plot in the book ends, as the hero spends most of the book in automated psychotherapy (think doctor.el with holographic output) coming to terms with what happened on his last trip out.
The games turn this into a wild "save the galaxy from an evil cyborg race" affair, but do so tastefully. There are lots of little details that do have counterparts in the book. The VR gear that drives the book's automated psychotherapy plays a central role in some puzzles in the first game, where you have to crash the simulation (from within) by causing an "out of memory. too many objects in the world" type of error. At one point, you first have to realize that you are in a simulation -- definitely one of the great moments in adventure gaming.
I do think that it is possible to do great movies inspired by books, and that there are some. But I'm pretty sure that Hollywood blockbusters having the same title as a book that's a classic (at least in some subculture) have a pretty slim chance of being among them.
At the time, Henry's address was @zoo.toronto.edu. When you look though the rec.arts.sf.* archives, there seems to be general consensus that Henry is Sandor at the Zoo.
...self-destructing. One thing that free markets are exceptionally bad at is maintaining a free market. Because for the individual player, a free market is a really uncomfortable place.
Sadly, this is very, very wrong as the US are armtwisting the rest of the planet into doing business their way. Successfully. Europe and Australia have their DMCA now, chances of outlawing software patents in Europe are pretty dim. Others will follow. Except China, perhaps -- my impression is that they are a dictatorship with leaders who actually know what they're doing.
Virtual Desktop Manager, part of the Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP. Sadly, it doesn't add a system menu entry to send a window to a different desktop, but apart from that it's quite servicable.
Bad examples. Thief engine games (Dark Project, Metal Age, System Shock 2) require a lot of futzing around to get working on XP with contemporary video cards. What you meant was probably "...I'll be keeping my Windows 98 box with TNT2 graphics for that purpose". Which is about the same as keeping your Sega Genesis around because you liked the games and has nothing to do with Linux being ready for the desktop or not.
Now, please take off your magic sunglasses or things are going to get real nasty.
You might be interested in the mozex extension to Mozilla and Firebird which lets you use a real editor for editing textareas.
I loved how they actually did some sort of promo for a product that the record company couldn't make any money off -- performing Cash Car Star on Jay Leno's Tonight Show. Being one of the more mass-compatible songs on Machina II, it probably would have done pretty good as a single.