Multiplayer gaming has been around since before the internet; it goes back at least as far as Space War. The attraction is simple: Like an old ad I saw for an online service (Prodigy, I think) said, "A computer is programmed to be challenging. A human opponent wants to rip your lungs out". At the very least, humans are better intelligences to oppose you. Most humans, anyhow.
The extension of that is that competitive types like to know about the person they are about to smack down; it makes it feel more real to them. Less competitive types like to feel the cameraderie of a shared challenge.
I think you should be prepared to be very, very surprised. Online gaming is a tremendously massive industry. I know exactly two people who prefer to game alone, and that's just because they haven't found a game that they enjoy where they feel competent enough to play with others. Please don't be so quick to generalise your personal experiences with a small gaming group to the much larger community where hundreds of people play together on each of hundreds or thousands of servers for each of hundreds of games all over the net. It turns out that people differ from each other.
This is a good opportunity to build complex statistics about the C++ grammar actually used in context. Learn from the NLP people! Parse the whole thing, and start finding common subtrees in the grammar used. Look at common lexical entries between subtrees, so we can make a tool that can help recognize errors by comparing against commonly used C++ grammar fragments. Or do function completion based on what kind of function you look like you're writing. See if you can do alignment with similar languages and do statistical source translation. If you keep information about comments used (and maybe apply some real NLP), you might even have a shot at automatically classifying functions based on their form, and documenting them with simple comments.
If that's too hard, try finding all n-grams instead, at least under some length. That's a lot more useful than just individual tokens or strings.
With a lot of data, you can do very cool things. Don't mess around with string frequency counting. C++ is simple compared to English, do something interesting.
1. Exchange is in NO WAY stable
We have dozens of Exchange servers running, most of which have been around since 5.5. I've never seen an exchange server crash, on the rare occasion I've had to restart the services, but more often than not it was an issue with BackupExecs Exchange agent.
My experience with Exchange has been that it falls over frequently. That was a long time ago now, and I imagine it's much improved, but instability was the hallmark of my Exchange experience for some time. The MTBF was probably about 3-5 days.
That said, I will never ever again deploy an Exchange server to one of my client sites. If a client insists, I will terminate the contract or require additional compensation due to the headache. It would never come to that though, because I would simply outsource the entire deployment to an Exchange service company (and it sounds to me like Dan Bercell works for one of these). Exchange is not trivial to manage, and requires careful setup and tuning. It has a reputation for this amongst IT professionals (at least in my circles). This is why Exchange service providers have so many clients: IT professionals in general don't want the headache.
2. Possible true
No not possibly.. Its true, take a look. There are a lot of solid products in the market place, we have even deployed a few of them and havent noticed any issues.
There are many products that integrate with Exchange. It would be overgeneralization to say that they all suck; clearly, there is variance as with any group of software from diverse vendors. However as third-party products they can't afford to suck to the degree that Microsoft can afford to: MS users are locked-in (as I will elaborate below).
3. I am sure MS is ashamed of many products
(Any company that releases so many would have to be, but if Exchange was one of them, they would have let it die out, which they are not.
I disagree; MS has shown that it is quite happy to foist buggy products on its users repeatedly until eventually responding to outcry by beginning development of a better solution. Witness, for example, Windows 98SE and Windows ME. This isn't to say that this is what is going on; rather, it says that it's entirely possible. MS does not have to respond quickly to customer complaints, because its software is compatible with MS software and third-party products written especially for it... and nothing else. MS software is a tremendous pain in the ass to integrate with other products. If you're using Exchange, you'd better be running SQL server, and your clients had better be Outlook, and if you want webmail it had better be IIS, and you would be crazy to use a non-MS CRM solution - or you may find you have a tremendous headache on your hands. Of course, this all has to run on Windows. Want to swap out Exchange? Well, now you have to give up all the extra bells and whistles for all the other components, which depend on having MS products end-to-end. Outlook loses shared calendaring, you'll require additional third-party stuff to integrate IIS, it's probably nearly impossible to integrate well with Active Directory, and I don't even think CRM will work without exchange, etc etc.
MS locks its users in by keeping its integration in-house or to licensees. That's a big business for them, and they're doing a good job of selling access to their monopoly without giving up their lock on it.
4. Outlook (all versions) is just a total disaster - it's unstable, full of security holes and actually makes an already poor "operating system" almost unusable
I guess thats why corporations all over the world continue to use it when there are cheaper alternatives... good point
This is also unsound. There may be another reason why corporations all over the world continue to use Outlook. I propose that that reason is that there are no alternatives, because only Outlook has the groupware and calendarin
I installed it to see what it was like, dual-boot with windows. Then, as usual, windows broke. It was simply easier to keep running Linux than reinstall windows, so I did. Seriously, there's no point in running windows except for gaming and Outlook these days. And friends don't let friends run Outlook.
The Americans use the NSA to monitor mon american communications because under their laws, foreigners have no rights. The Canadians use CISIS to monitor american communications for the same reasons. Then they trade data.
This is simply untrue. CSIS (the Canadian Security Intelligence Service) does not employ spies and does not gather intelligence directly within foreign countries. This is not to say they have no foreign intelligence, but rather that they get it from others. I quote from the CSIS FAQ:
CSIS has liaison offices in some countries. Liaison officers are involved in the exchange of security intelligence information which concerns threats to the security of Canada.
Ahem. Apparently the D70 actually is readable by dcraw so I may be able to use it (and possibly the D70s as well). I guess Nikon only cares about restricting its tip-top of the line cameras, which I can't afford.
This doesn't change the fact that I don't like how they are acting, though.
I'm up for this. I was previously in the final stages of pondering the purchase of a Nikon D70s when they come out next month. You know that stage where you're trying to figure out if you can justify the cost, because you really, really want one?
Now I'm shopping for a Canon. You say you like Olympus? Which model do you recommend?
I don't even usually take RAW images; I just absolutely abhor Nikon's attitude about this. It's so very 1980s. So yeah, I'll make sure to tell all my friends and anyone who'll listen that they should avoid Nikon. Surely there's a petition going. Where do I sign up?
You know, I used to make the same argument. My friend Pete shut me up very quickly by pointing out to me that in order for it to get bad enough for the middle and upper classes to hurt, it has to get very, very bad for the lower class. Add this to the fact that some rich people got even more rich during the great depression, and suddenly it sounds like a very bloody path that you are suggesting, for uncertain gains.
I think you are looking for Mozilla Lightning (yeah, I know it's only a code name). As am I, and anyone else who knows Outlook users.
Re:I'd like to see two pointers, two focuses
on
X.Org 6.8.2 is Out
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· Score: 1
This is a great idea, and I remember it being the subject of research of Dr. Kori Inkpen in the EDGE lab at my university in this project. I recall one of the main points being that it can be used very well for collaborative play and education for young children.
Strictly speaking of course, you're correct - if you do not know beforehand whether you will emit signal or noise. However, the idea is that "there are two ways" is supposed to suggest to the reader that the first one is to emit only signal (which is what most people assume they will be doing), and the other way is to emit no noise. I think Slashdot would be much better if more people considered that what they were about to emit is not signal.
I will now consider rephrasing my sig to make this clear. You're the first person to ever bring this up.
In other news, I should follow my own advice, as this post is clearly noise.
The problem with transparency is that many societies are intensely hypocritical. There are many things that a person might do in private that, if known about by the public, would lead to negative consequences for that person. One obvious example (there are a host of examples related to sex) is homosexual behaviour; it's okay by some people's measure, but not by others'. Another example might be lazing around the house naked; in a very transparent society, that's not private any more, and a man might not want people to know how big his dick is. We can take this to plausible extremes: Like sugar on your pasta in the morning? Maybe people at the office will start thinking you're a wierdo.
The bottom line is that a transparent society would have no buffer between those who want to deviate from conformity and those who use social pressure to enforce conformity. I disapprove of the actions of those conformists. Then again, would something like this would force us all to become more flexible? Forgive my pessimism, but I doubt it.
All I want is to be able to pick three pixels, and watch the colour value (ie, numbers) change as I do other operations, like curve manipulation. As it is I have to write the numbers down and re-check them, which is kind of nuts.
Now, if this is doable some other way, then let me know how... but the eyedropper tool replaces the colour and never updates it.
The down side to WordPress is that it's really very immature code. Not only does it handle UTF-8 characters poorly, but even casual usage turns up a number of bugs in various different parts. This suggests to me that the developers fixed it in one section but didn't fix it in other parts of the code - not exactly thorough. I ran into all this stuff inside my first three hours of usage.
Of course, all of this is fixable, and just calls for more people to jump in and get involved. I learned a bit of PHP and hacked myself a fix for the UTF-8 issues I was having, inside five hours of my first wordpress installation (note that's two hours after I found the problem and figured out how to replicate it reliably). I also installed and improved upon some of the comment spammer blacklist plugins, which ended up working very well. Prior to fiddling with wordpress, I had no PHP experience at all. I am not a programming god, either.
The developers are also responsive to suggestions - I posted a bug about some of the UTF issues I could not solve, and it was resolved for me. Thanks, matt!
I think that it's important to manage expectations when advocating software, which is why I want to make it clear the wordpress does not yet seem rock-solid stable. However, I think that with enough eyeballs (Hi, everyone!), it will definitely become the secure, flexible platform that most of everyone wants.
Spammers need not apply.
Re:While this is great for open source advocates..
on
TheOpenCD 2.0 Released
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· Score: 1
But, do open source developers "want" people to use their product, or rather are they just happy when people do?
OSS developers want many eyes to look at their code, and if the project is more popular more eyes will look at it. It is very common for OSS projects to need to reach some "critical point" where it is useful enough to draw more developers before it can really take off. Firefox vs Mozilla is a good example - Firefox has very active plugin development "scene", and Mozilla support is often added as an afterthought simply because it is less popular, even though it is almost the same software!
Additionally, OSS users want many people to use the software because of the network effect - for example, more people using OpenOffice.org mean fewer people locked in to Microsoft Office, which means you are more likely to be able to share documents with a randomly selected acquaintance.
In short, many products work better with marketing plans, even if they come with no cost.
... then at least a person has to gain physical access to the machine before they can compromise your account. Of course, we all know that once a person has physical access to the machine, all bets are off anyway.
Unless of course the password is for authentication with some remote server. Maybe the keyboard is at home, and the server is at the bank.
Coceve has patents pending on its unique technology for providing a platform for delivering messages to a wide variety of IM services. Its trademark on "IM Smarter" is also pending registration at the USPTO.
I know of considerable prior art on several patents that he could have applied for, but he doesn't give the patent numbers here so I suppose I can't be sure what he's claiming he's done. Anyhow, writing something that interacts with users via a text interface over networks is not new, and that really does appear to be all he's doing.
I'm curious, where in the world are colours offensive, and which colours are offensive? Can you tell me more about why this is the case, or maybe give a link? I'm a little surprised I've never heard of this.
5/14 NEVER FORGET America has declared war on science fiction writers!
I'm afraid you misunderstand the current state of US foreign policy. The group "science fiction writers" is a tangible group. It is possible to round up science fiction writers and shoot them. This is not consistent with current policy.
Instead, the USA must declare war on something intangible, like Science Fiction - or better, to declare war on the abstract concept Science. This is much more consistent with the way things are done in the USA these days.
Slashdot Mirror
Multiplayer gaming has been around since before the internet; it goes back at least as far as Space War. The attraction is simple: Like an old ad I saw for an online service (Prodigy, I think) said, "A computer is programmed to be challenging. A human opponent wants to rip your lungs out". At the very least, humans are better intelligences to oppose you. Most humans, anyhow. The extension of that is that competitive types like to know about the person they are about to smack down; it makes it feel more real to them. Less competitive types like to feel the cameraderie of a shared challenge. I think you should be prepared to be very, very surprised. Online gaming is a tremendously massive industry. I know exactly two people who prefer to game alone, and that's just because they haven't found a game that they enjoy where they feel competent enough to play with others. Please don't be so quick to generalise your personal experiences with a small gaming group to the much larger community where hundreds of people play together on each of hundreds or thousands of servers for each of hundreds of games all over the net. It turns out that people differ from each other.
This is a good opportunity to build complex statistics about the C++ grammar actually used in context. Learn from the NLP people! Parse the whole thing, and start finding common subtrees in the grammar used. Look at common lexical entries between subtrees, so we can make a tool that can help recognize errors by comparing against commonly used C++ grammar fragments. Or do function completion based on what kind of function you look like you're writing. See if you can do alignment with similar languages and do statistical source translation. If you keep information about comments used (and maybe apply some real NLP), you might even have a shot at automatically classifying functions based on their form, and documenting them with simple comments.
If that's too hard, try finding all n-grams instead, at least under some length. That's a lot more useful than just individual tokens or strings.
With a lot of data, you can do very cool things. Don't mess around with string frequency counting. C++ is simple compared to English, do something interesting.
My experience with Exchange has been that it falls over frequently. That was a long time ago now, and I imagine it's much improved, but instability was the hallmark of my Exchange experience for some time. The MTBF was probably about 3-5 days.
That said, I will never ever again deploy an Exchange server to one of my client sites. If a client insists, I will terminate the contract or require additional compensation due to the headache. It would never come to that though, because I would simply outsource the entire deployment to an Exchange service company (and it sounds to me like Dan Bercell works for one of these). Exchange is not trivial to manage, and requires careful setup and tuning. It has a reputation for this amongst IT professionals (at least in my circles). This is why Exchange service providers have so many clients: IT professionals in general don't want the headache.
There are many products that integrate with Exchange. It would be overgeneralization to say that they all suck; clearly, there is variance as with any group of software from diverse vendors. However as third-party products they can't afford to suck to the degree that Microsoft can afford to: MS users are locked-in (as I will elaborate below).
I disagree; MS has shown that it is quite happy to foist buggy products on its users repeatedly until eventually responding to outcry by beginning development of a better solution. Witness, for example, Windows 98SE and Windows ME. This isn't to say that this is what is going on; rather, it says that it's entirely possible. MS does not have to respond quickly to customer complaints, because its software is compatible with MS software and third-party products written especially for it... and nothing else. MS software is a tremendous pain in the ass to integrate with other products. If you're using Exchange, you'd better be running SQL server, and your clients had better be Outlook, and if you want webmail it had better be IIS, and you would be crazy to use a non-MS CRM solution - or you may find you have a tremendous headache on your hands. Of course, this all has to run on Windows. Want to swap out Exchange? Well, now you have to give up all the extra bells and whistles for all the other components, which depend on having MS products end-to-end. Outlook loses shared calendaring, you'll require additional third-party stuff to integrate IIS, it's probably nearly impossible to integrate well with Active Directory, and I don't even think CRM will work without exchange, etc etc.
MS locks its users in by keeping its integration in-house or to licensees. That's a big business for them, and they're doing a good job of selling access to their monopoly without giving up their lock on it.
This is also unsound. There may be another reason why corporations all over the world continue to use Outlook. I propose that that reason is that there are no alternatives, because only Outlook has the groupware and calendarin
I installed it to see what it was like, dual-boot with windows. Then, as usual, windows broke. It was simply easier to keep running Linux than reinstall windows, so I did. Seriously, there's no point in running windows except for gaming and Outlook these days. And friends don't let friends run Outlook.
They can utter whatever they like to a citizen of a free country like Canada. That doesn't mean anyone will pay attention.
Ahem. Apparently the D70 actually is readable by dcraw so I may be able to use it (and possibly the D70s as well). I guess Nikon only cares about restricting its tip-top of the line cameras, which I can't afford. This doesn't change the fact that I don't like how they are acting, though.
I'm up for this. I was previously in the final stages of pondering the purchase of a Nikon D70s when they come out next month. You know that stage where you're trying to figure out if you can justify the cost, because you really, really want one?
Now I'm shopping for a Canon. You say you like Olympus? Which model do you recommend?
I don't even usually take RAW images; I just absolutely abhor Nikon's attitude about this. It's so very 1980s. So yeah, I'll make sure to tell all my friends and anyone who'll listen that they should avoid Nikon. Surely there's a petition going. Where do I sign up?
You know it was Expo 86, right? There was no Expo 87; it is not an annual event.
I think you are looking for Mozilla Lightning (yeah, I know it's only a code name). As am I, and anyone else who knows Outlook users.
This is a great idea, and I remember it being the subject of research of Dr. Kori Inkpen in the EDGE lab at my university in this project. I recall one of the main points being that it can be used very well for collaborative play and education for young children.
I will now consider rephrasing my sig to make this clear. You're the first person to ever bring this up.
In other news, I should follow my own advice, as this post is clearly noise.
Davyd Madeley's page (coral cache) shows a cute overview of the new features that you can't see at all in those stupid screenshots.
The bottom line is that a transparent society would have no buffer between those who want to deviate from conformity and those who use social pressure to enforce conformity. I disapprove of the actions of those conformists. Then again, would something like this would force us all to become more flexible? Forgive my pessimism, but I doubt it.
All I want is to be able to pick three pixels, and watch the colour value (ie, numbers) change as I do other operations, like curve manipulation. As it is I have to write the numbers down and re-check them, which is kind of nuts.
Now, if this is doable some other way, then let me know how... but the eyedropper tool replaces the colour and never updates it.
Of course, all of this is fixable, and just calls for more people to jump in and get involved. I learned a bit of PHP and hacked myself a fix for the UTF-8 issues I was having, inside five hours of my first wordpress installation (note that's two hours after I found the problem and figured out how to replicate it reliably). I also installed and improved upon some of the comment spammer blacklist plugins, which ended up working very well. Prior to fiddling with wordpress, I had no PHP experience at all. I am not a programming god, either.
The developers are also responsive to suggestions - I posted a bug about some of the UTF issues I could not solve, and it was resolved for me. Thanks, matt!
I think that it's important to manage expectations when advocating software, which is why I want to make it clear the wordpress does not yet seem rock-solid stable. However, I think that with enough eyeballs (Hi, everyone!), it will definitely become the secure, flexible platform that most of everyone wants.
Spammers need not apply.
Additionally, OSS users want many people to use the software because of the network effect - for example, more people using OpenOffice.org mean fewer people locked in to Microsoft Office, which means you are more likely to be able to share documents with a randomly selected acquaintance.
In short, many products work better with marketing plans, even if they come with no cost.
I sure hope my parents are die-hard. I'd miss not being able to call them up and chat every now and again.
Considering this is posted on a blog claiming to be a news site, this is clearly from the slashdot-irony-meta-dept.
Instead, the USA must declare war on something intangible, like Science Fiction - or better, to declare war on the abstract concept Science. This is much more consistent with the way things are done in the USA these days.