Re:Just wait for the game with this feature...
on
Mutating Animations
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Download the E3 demo of Half-Life 2. In it there is a section where people are fighting alongside Gordon. This didn't look too spectacular until the presenter announced that these characters were NOT moving according to a script. The characters were given an objective (help Gordon get to point X), but were not given a path to take or any knowledge about the obstacles in the way. At that point my eyes opened wide, watching these people duck behind debris, covering fellow fighters, shoot-move-shoot-move... the movement and logic that they possessed looked either preprogrammed (which again, they say is not the case), or very human-like.
Microsoft's giveaway sounds similar to what Mastercard did a couple years back. Whenever you make a purchase on your Mastercard, you had a 1 in N chance of winning a million dollars or something. I believe they also had a way to send a SASE to them to manually enter the "contest". My guess is MS will offer a similar workaround.
While technically a "binary package format", Gentoo's Portage has a way to create binary tarballs of merged programs. However, this is not meant to be a way to distribute software to random users; instead it's for setups where you have a bunch of similar machines and want to compile once, install many.
When you merge a package, do "emerge -b package". It builds and installs the program like normal, then creates a signed tarball file that you can use to install on other machines. emerge can then take that tbz2 file and treat it as an alternative to the actual compile process.
While I agree with your statements, I just thought I'd butt in and fill in the "???" blank: up2date. Yes, it requires an RHN subscription (but if you're seriously using a redhat distro, $5/mo (1yr@$60) is not the end of the world), but in its basic function, it performs the way apt-get or emerge does. "up2date evolution" will grab evolution plus all of its dependencies, and will block you if you have any conflicts.
My biggest gripe is not the commercial aspect of it, but it would be nice if you could add secondary up2date servers, or if redhat released an officially-supported up2date server so you can manage a bunch of redhat machines without having to go directly to redhat's up2date server for each machine. (There is a program called "current" that mimics most of the up2date server functionality, but it's not perfect.)
Have you used the Outlook connector for slox 4 yet? My company is currently looking for alternatives to our current setup (qmail + phpgroupware, which works great for half the company, but the other half whines about not being able to sync their calendar with their palms, and refuses to use anything but outlook to manage their contacts). I'm looking at slox now (their web-based demo looks BEAUTIFUL), but there doesn't seem to be anything on the web about how well their outlook sync conduits work yet.
June 11: I have been observing Mom for quite some time. She has been facinating over the last few months. Today I decided to give her a little test. I placed a computer pre-loaded with Lindows 4.0 in her habitat to see what her reaction will be. I hope this proves to be a valuable experiment.
June 12: After ignoring the computer yesterday, she walked up to it this morning and stared vacantly at the monitor. I hope she figures out how to turn on the machine soon.
June 14: Success! The computer is on, and is currently loading Lindows. Mom seems facinated with the fsck's progress bar. The desktop is now loaded, and... what's this? A flash presentation has popped up and is explaining how to get started with using Lindows. This frightened Mom; she is currently beating the case with a large rock.
June 16: The computer has been replaced, and I took the liberty to disable the welcome presentation this time. It appears Mom is learning mouse movements fast. It took a few hours, but she managed to find and open OpenOffice.org. Her concept of written language is improving; yesterday all she could type is random garbage, but now she's at a level equivalent to an IRC user. Now that I think about it, that's a step backwards.
June 19: Like most mammals, Mom got bored of doing things like typing and playing solitaire. She found the shell and began exploring. Unfortunately, I was quite disappointed to see that the first programming language she discovered was Java, and she has also been getting attached to Emacs. How unfortunate.
June 21: Oh great, now she's starting a flame war on debian-devel. Where did I go wrong?
It's saying that these slot machines are programmed for you to lose. For example, say you have a '2' onscreen and you have to choose between higher (up to 10) and lower (down to 1). If you pick 'lower', you lose, and if you pick 'higher', you lose as well. These machines have no winning possibilities in certain situations, which is NOT something that IGT does!
True, I kinda forgot to make a point in that respect, but the net result is the same: You win N% of the time. If you didn't have the roms, you wouldn't even know about this. The only thing you see if how often you win.
I've lived in Nevada for a little over a year now, and know several people who work at IGT, a gaming manufacturer. Some of the things I learned suprised me, some didn't. All I know is the odds are definitely not in your favor. Is it illegal? Hell, no.
First off, the article (yes, I read the article). The author's biggest peeve is that the outcome of the "double or nothing" option on the fruit machines is determined before the user even chooses. Big whoop. Whether the magic number is determined before or after you choose is meaningless; it does not affect the odds.
Second, a previous poster mentioned the RNG. In IGT slots (and I would imagine most modern ones), the RNG device is a super-sensitive measurement device that detects tiny vibrations in the chassis. This is a much better way of seeding a number generator than any software-based solution. No, banging on the chassis won't increase your odds, but it will cause the machine to tilt and will probably get the attention of a security guard.;) Also, the machine uses this entropy to re-seed itself thousands of times per second, not just once in the beginning.
Lastly, there's the method for choosing if you win or loose. As soon as you press the "spin reels" button (or pull the handle on machine that still support that), the outcome is already known. Let me repeat: THE OUTCOME IS KNOWN before the reels start spinning. The actual spinning of the reels is just eye candy.
This part takes a bit more explaining: say each reel have three symbols on them (we'll call them A, B, and C; in reality, the reels have maybe a couple dozen). In this example, C is the most favorable; you get a jackpot if you get three C's. You would think that this would mean that you would have a 1 in 27 chance of hitting the jackpot (3^3). Nope. The internal mechanism works like so: Okay, you have 3 symbols on each wheel. Inside the program, there are 3 arrays of symbols, but the number of elements inside the array is much more than 3. Say these are the arrays:
Reel 1: AAABBBBCCCCC
Reel 2: AAAABBBBCCCC
Reel 3: AAAAAAAABBBC
The machine picks a random element from each array. Do you see what's going on here? There are more Cs in the first reel array, making it very likely to hit a C on the first reel. Next is a slightly less chance to hit C again. The third time is nearly impossible. Yet it builds you hope up, thinking you're about to hit the jackpot.
Is this deceitful? Yes. Does it prey upon the stupid? Yes. Is it illegal? Nope. These methods produce a certain payout percentage, and the techniques for producing them are "public" knowledge, usually regulated by your state's gambling office.
You also can't (or couldn't the last time I was unfortunate enough to use RH--May '02) run a few simple commands and upgrade a box to the latest release. Debian and gentoo do it just fine.
First of all, let me say that RPM is not perfect, just like everything else on the planet. I hate it when people have this "$X sucks nobody should ever use $X if you don't 100% agree with me you are an idiot" attitude. That being said, let me play devil's advocate for a bit:
I bought a Sony DRX-500ULX a couple days ago, and found out how to turn the 6 RH8 discs into a single bootable DVDR disc. Works perfectly. When friends heard about that, I became popular for some reason.:) I've been selling them at cost to friend, but figured others would be interested too. Therefore, I put up a site where you can pay via paypal and get a burned DVD (in DVD-R or DVD+R format) shipped to you. Each DVD is $7.50 which includes shipping.
Please don't flame me for trying to sell something on slashdot. At $7.50/DVD, after figuring in media costs and shipping (and the fact that it takes 1.5 hours to burn a DVD), I'm definitely not going to make any money.:) I'm just doing this because I know people are interested.
A semi-related story... I have a Samsung N400 from Sprint with the data cable (dial #777, turns your phone into a PPP device, but the speed is over 128k with latency anywhere between 300 and 800ms). I'm currently in SF (no wireless visible from my hotel on fisherman's wharf), and the data is free, so I hooked it up. I went to my company's home page, and noticed the graphics looks like they were run through Photoshop with 95% JPEG compression.
Turns out, sprint has a transparent web proxy (the IP address I get via PPP is public, so it's being done transparently) that takes images and severely reduces the quality. It also appears to take web pages that do not gzip compress their HTML and does so.
Now, I imagine some people would be jumping up and down saying "I never authorized you to change the content I requested!", but I am not one of those. Cellular data can be fast, but the latency is horrible by nature, so I can use all the help I get. And since this is not a temporary internet connection, I want things fast, not necessarily true to the original.
In a previous story which I cannot find, a piece of software was discussed that you run, and it automatically graps images being transfered via WiFi and creates a real time collage of what people are downloading onto their computers.
You are thinking of Driftnet. And this is not limited to wireless networks without WEP. Once you have the WEP key (trivial if you work at the origanization, slightly less than trivial if not), you still receive all packets travelling across the network. Much like a hub, which will also work with Driftnet. Certain cable networks allow you to see peers within your local segment too.
Driftnet by itself is slightly limited display-wise. It does have a basic realtime image viewer, but I've found that plugging it into xscreensaver is much more enjoyable.
Oh great, now we're going to start seeing "Phoenix is dying" AC posts...
It is official; my access_log confirms: Phoenix is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Phoenix community when Microsoft confirmed that Phoenix market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all desktops. Coming on the heels of a recent review of my apache user agent logs which plainly states that Phoenix has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Phoenix is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent "Who's Yer Daddy" browser popularity contest.
Great, now Google is going to grow up with mental problems, constantly wondering if its creators really love it. This will probably lead to Google going into a KFC 20 years from know and shooting up the place. I mean, how well would YOU do if your parents told you that you were an accident?
My OS supports IPv6, but my router doesn't. Doubt that my ISP does either. Apparently this will only be truly possible for people with direct pipes (T1, etc.) Or does anyone know of ways around these problems other than nagging my ISP and router manufacturer?
Use a tunnel broker. It lets you tunnel ipv6 connections over ipv4 to another endpoint. Two of the most popular are Freenet6 and Hurricane Electric. Hurricane Electric requires a static ipv4 IP, but Freenet6 works with dynamic IPs.
According to SNPP, the 300th episode, both airing and production, was last week's Strong Arms of the Ma, but Fox is claiming Barting Over as the 300th episode for some reason. I don't think I've seen WHY though.
Re:Prices are out of whack for 1991
on
The 1991 "X-Box"
·
· Score: 1
I was thinking the same thing. Also, check out the design for the controller. Doesn't it look awfully close to the redesigned NES controller, which came out several years after 1991?
I am a sysadmin for a datacenter, and have a modem/phone line set up just for monitoring pages. Nearly all cell providers provide a "TAP gateway", a dialin number (usually at 4800/9600 baud, you you can utilize that REAL old hardware:) that lets you send SMS messages. This has 2 advantages:
1) Messages sent through a TAP gateway are usually received faster than going through the provider's web or email gateway. IE, seconds instead of minutes or hours.
2) If you are having routing problems, an SMS page via email wouldn't get through, whereas dialing to the TAP gateway just depends on the phone line.
I'm going to be sending a company HD to Dell to RMA since it's starting to fail (stupid IBM DeskStar 60GB drives)... From what I've heard (and contrary to a few other posts in this story), it is still possible to retrieve some data from a hard drive where you've done "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda" (I still don't get how, but I err on the side of caution).
Enter GNU shred. Its default operation does 25 passes at the drive, with passes such as random data, random patterns and all zeros. Theoretically, the drive has been overwritten so many times that there is almost no chance of recovering data.
Of course, just to play it safe I'll also run it across my stereo speakers a few times too:)
Slashdot Mirror
Download the E3 demo of Half-Life 2. In it there is a section where people are fighting alongside Gordon. This didn't look too spectacular until the presenter announced that these characters were NOT moving according to a script. The characters were given an objective (help Gordon get to point X), but were not given a path to take or any knowledge about the obstacles in the way. At that point my eyes opened wide, watching these people duck behind debris, covering fellow fighters, shoot-move-shoot-move... the movement and logic that they possessed looked either preprogrammed (which again, they say is not the case), or very human-like.
Microsoft's giveaway sounds similar to what Mastercard did a couple years back. Whenever you make a purchase on your Mastercard, you had a 1 in N chance of winning a million dollars or something. I believe they also had a way to send a SASE to them to manually enter the "contest". My guess is MS will offer a similar workaround.
While technically a "binary package format", Gentoo's Portage has a way to create binary tarballs of merged programs. However, this is not meant to be a way to distribute software to random users; instead it's for setups where you have a bunch of similar machines and want to compile once, install many.
When you merge a package, do "emerge -b package". It builds and installs the program like normal, then creates a signed tarball file that you can use to install on other machines. emerge can then take that tbz2 file and treat it as an alternative to the actual compile process.
While I agree with your statements, I just thought I'd butt in and fill in the "???" blank: up2date. Yes, it requires an RHN subscription (but if you're seriously using a redhat distro, $5/mo (1yr@$60) is not the end of the world), but in its basic function, it performs the way apt-get or emerge does. "up2date evolution" will grab evolution plus all of its dependencies, and will block you if you have any conflicts.
My biggest gripe is not the commercial aspect of it, but it would be nice if you could add secondary up2date servers, or if redhat released an officially-supported up2date server so you can manage a bunch of redhat machines without having to go directly to redhat's up2date server for each machine. (There is a program called "current" that mimics most of the up2date server functionality, but it's not perfect.)
Have you used the Outlook connector for slox 4 yet? My company is currently looking for alternatives to our current setup (qmail + phpgroupware, which works great for half the company, but the other half whines about not being able to sync their calendar with their palms, and refuses to use anything but outlook to manage their contacts). I'm looking at slox now (their web-based demo looks BEAUTIFUL), but there doesn't seem to be anything on the web about how well their outlook sync conduits work yet.
June 11: I have been observing Mom for quite some time. She has been facinating over the last few months. Today I decided to give her a little test. I placed a computer pre-loaded with Lindows 4.0 in her habitat to see what her reaction will be. I hope this proves to be a valuable experiment.
June 12: After ignoring the computer yesterday, she walked up to it this morning and stared vacantly at the monitor. I hope she figures out how to turn on the machine soon.
June 14: Success! The computer is on, and is currently loading Lindows. Mom seems facinated with the fsck's progress bar. The desktop is now loaded, and... what's this? A flash presentation has popped up and is explaining how to get started with using Lindows. This frightened Mom; she is currently beating the case with a large rock.
June 16: The computer has been replaced, and I took the liberty to disable the welcome presentation this time. It appears Mom is learning mouse movements fast. It took a few hours, but she managed to find and open OpenOffice.org. Her concept of written language is improving; yesterday all she could type is random garbage, but now she's at a level equivalent to an IRC user. Now that I think about it, that's a step backwards.
June 19: Like most mammals, Mom got bored of doing things like typing and playing solitaire. She found the shell and began exploring. Unfortunately, I was quite disappointed to see that the first programming language she discovered was Java, and she has also been getting attached to Emacs. How unfortunate.
June 21: Oh great, now she's starting a flame war on debian-devel. Where did I go wrong?
True, I kinda forgot to make a point in that respect, but the net result is the same: You win N% of the time. If you didn't have the roms, you wouldn't even know about this. The only thing you see if how often you win.
You are correct. I know the difference, but my fingers often say different things than my mind. Oh well.
First off, the article (yes, I read the article). The author's biggest peeve is that the outcome of the "double or nothing" option on the fruit machines is determined before the user even chooses. Big whoop. Whether the magic number is determined before or after you choose is meaningless; it does not affect the odds.
Second, a previous poster mentioned the RNG. In IGT slots (and I would imagine most modern ones), the RNG device is a super-sensitive measurement device that detects tiny vibrations in the chassis. This is a much better way of seeding a number generator than any software-based solution. No, banging on the chassis won't increase your odds, but it will cause the machine to tilt and will probably get the attention of a security guard. ;) Also, the machine uses this entropy to re-seed itself thousands of times per second, not just once in the beginning.
Lastly, there's the method for choosing if you win or loose. As soon as you press the "spin reels" button (or pull the handle on machine that still support that), the outcome is already known. Let me repeat: THE OUTCOME IS KNOWN before the reels start spinning. The actual spinning of the reels is just eye candy.
This part takes a bit more explaining: say each reel have three symbols on them (we'll call them A, B, and C; in reality, the reels have maybe a couple dozen). In this example, C is the most favorable; you get a jackpot if you get three C's. You would think that this would mean that you would have a 1 in 27 chance of hitting the jackpot (3^3). Nope. The internal mechanism works like so: Okay, you have 3 symbols on each wheel. Inside the program, there are 3 arrays of symbols, but the number of elements inside the array is much more than 3. Say these are the arrays:
- Reel 1: AAABBBBCCCCC
- Reel 2: AAAABBBBCCCC
- Reel 3: AAAAAAAABBBC
The machine picks a random element from each array. Do you see what's going on here? There are more Cs in the first reel array, making it very likely to hit a C on the first reel. Next is a slightly less chance to hit C again. The third time is nearly impossible. Yet it builds you hope up, thinking you're about to hit the jackpot.Is this deceitful? Yes. Does it prey upon the stupid? Yes. Is it illegal? Nope. These methods produce a certain payout percentage, and the techniques for producing them are "public" knowledge, usually regulated by your state's gambling office.
In conclusion, stick to blackjack.
The analogy doesn't cut over too well. Observe:
"We've publically attacked, insulted and annoyed them for the first couple days. Now let's stop and ask to kindly discuss the issue."
"We've bombed the shit out of them for a couple days, now let's stop and kindly ask them to give up power."
Actually, I would imagine several Austrailians want to ban spam.
Okay, that was a very bad joke...
The stations should just fire up WinMX, download the new songs, then transfer them to CDDA. I mean, they already have the right to play them...
Seriously. Actually, I wonder how many radio stations use MP3 as a native format for songs they play now.
First of all, let me say that RPM is not perfect, just like everything else on the planet. I hate it when people have this "$X sucks nobody should ever use $X if you don't 100% agree with me you are an idiot" attitude. That being said, let me play devil's advocate for a bit:
rpm -Uvh ftp://ftp.rpmfind.net/linux/redhat/8.0/en/os/i386/ RedHat/RPMS/redhat-release-8.0-8.noarch.rpm
up2date -u -f
Lookie, you just upgraded your system to 8.0.
Please don't flame me for trying to sell something on slashdot. At $7.50/DVD, after figuring in media costs and shipping (and the fact that it takes 1.5 hours to burn a DVD), I'm definitely not going to make any money. :) I'm just doing this because I know people are interested.
A semi-related story... I have a Samsung N400 from Sprint with the data cable (dial #777, turns your phone into a PPP device, but the speed is over 128k with latency anywhere between 300 and 800ms). I'm currently in SF (no wireless visible from my hotel on fisherman's wharf), and the data is free, so I hooked it up. I went to my company's home page, and noticed the graphics looks like they were run through Photoshop with 95% JPEG compression.
Turns out, sprint has a transparent web proxy (the IP address I get via PPP is public, so it's being done transparently) that takes images and severely reduces the quality. It also appears to take web pages that do not gzip compress their HTML and does so.
Now, I imagine some people would be jumping up and down saying "I never authorized you to change the content I requested!", but I am not one of those. Cellular data can be fast, but the latency is horrible by nature, so I can use all the help I get. And since this is not a temporary internet connection, I want things fast, not necessarily true to the original.
You are thinking of Driftnet. And this is not limited to wireless networks without WEP. Once you have the WEP key (trivial if you work at the origanization, slightly less than trivial if not), you still receive all packets travelling across the network. Much like a hub, which will also work with Driftnet. Certain cable networks allow you to see peers within your local segment too.
Driftnet by itself is slightly limited display-wise. It does have a basic realtime image viewer, but I've found that plugging it into xscreensaver is much more enjoyable.
It is official; my access_log confirms: Phoenix is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Phoenix community when Microsoft confirmed that Phoenix market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all desktops. Coming on the heels of a recent review of my apache user agent logs which plainly states that Phoenix has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Phoenix is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent "Who's Yer Daddy" browser popularity contest.
Great, now Google is going to grow up with mental problems, constantly wondering if its creators really love it. This will probably lead to Google going into a KFC 20 years from know and shooting up the place. I mean, how well would YOU do if your parents told you that you were an accident?
Use a tunnel broker. It lets you tunnel ipv6 connections over ipv4 to another endpoint. Two of the most popular are Freenet6 and Hurricane Electric. Hurricane Electric requires a static ipv4 IP, but Freenet6 works with dynamic IPs.
According to SNPP, the 300th episode, both airing and production, was last week's Strong Arms of the Ma, but Fox is claiming Barting Over as the 300th episode for some reason. I don't think I've seen WHY though.
I was thinking the same thing. Also, check out the design for the controller. Doesn't it look awfully close to the redesigned NES controller, which came out several years after 1991?
What? I don't see anything absurd about Cold Fusion magazines :)
I am a sysadmin for a datacenter, and have a modem/phone line set up just for monitoring pages. Nearly all cell providers provide a "TAP gateway", a dialin number (usually at 4800/9600 baud, you you can utilize that REAL old hardware :) that lets you send SMS messages. This has 2 advantages:
1) Messages sent through a TAP gateway are usually received faster than going through the provider's web or email gateway. IE, seconds instead of minutes or hours.
2) If you are having routing problems, an SMS page via email wouldn't get through, whereas dialing to the TAP gateway just depends on the phone line.
I'm going to be sending a company HD to Dell to RMA since it's starting to fail (stupid IBM DeskStar 60GB drives)... From what I've heard (and contrary to a few other posts in this story), it is still possible to retrieve some data from a hard drive where you've done "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda" (I still don't get how, but I err on the side of caution).
:)
Enter GNU shred. Its default operation does 25 passes at the drive, with passes such as random data, random patterns and all zeros. Theoretically, the drive has been overwritten so many times that there is almost no chance of recovering data.
Of course, just to play it safe I'll also run it across my stereo speakers a few times too
Why does the name J. Hutton Pulitzer make me think of L. Ron Hubbard?
Actually, there are parallels... Their state of sanity, for one...