It's kind of like pornography - no one will admit to liking naked people
Then let's share. Being male, and having a pulse, I, Colin MacDonald quite like porn. I enjoy looking at quality animations (>300kbs, sound please) of nekkid ladies. I mean, why else would I pay for a broadband connection?
Whenever I get the regular whinging "Why's nobody using our portal?" survey from my ISP, I tell them the bare nekkid truth that a selection of high quality reviewed porn content would do wonders for their hit rate. They already know it's true, but it'll take some honesty from me and thee to convince their suits that it's OK to admit that news tickers and lame special offers aren't where the money is.
And to get back on topic, at least if I'm watching porn, it's stopping "Slay-O-Rama IV" from warping mah frajal little mahnd, right?;)
Games are an easy target, because you can pick a title to demonize: "After Little Andy went postal, I realised that he'd been playing 'Schoolyard Slut-O-Rama Slayfest IV' for six hours a day every day for months. I should never have been allowed to purchase that game for him!"
TOC was created by AOL to allow unofficial clients to connect to the AIM service
Does anyone have a link to the actual TOC specification so that we can check this? There used to be info at http://www.aim.aol.com/tik , but that's vanished (quelle surprise).
And those with experience enough in the industry to know that with proprietary products you're gonna depend on a company staying in buisness and actually supporting their products (which usually isnt exactly what happens over a 5 year period).
Which is true, but signifies nothing. Those with experience in the industry also know that most purchasing decisions are made by inbred IT goons who base their buys on brochures, kickbacks, and (mostly useless) support and SLA promises.
Why shouldn't AOL bitch about this, in any form they choose, when they're paying for bandwith, etc
What's with all the cognitive dissonance? AOL voluntarily have provided TOC for 3rd party clients to use. They've explicitely OK'd 3rd party clients. I don't understand where the confusion is coming from.
Please read the article before trying for a first post.
AOL volutarily provided TOC, an open interface to their system for 3rd party clients to use. It's since been left to rot, but until they remove it, they have no "Get orrf moi LAAAAN" argument.
Home version - never going to happen?
on
Fission in a Box
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· Score: 1
Given the current state of energy-industry politics, few people familiar with the field allow themselves to imagine that such a machine [the home version] will ever exist.
That's pretty short sighted for people who should be thinking 100,000 years or so down the line. Or am I being naive? I know our current strategy is to bury nuke waste with a "Do not open until Christmas 102,001AD" sign on it, but I'd like to believe that someone in the nuke industry is thinking beyond their next set of stock options.
How long are hydrocarbon fossil fuels (coal, oil, gas) going to last? 500 years? 100? 50? 20? And when they go, what's the population going to be? 10 billion? 50 billion? Where's the space for wind/wave/solar/GM alcohol crop farms going to come from, considering that we're currently hacking down the last of the rainforest to make Mooby Burgers.
In the mid term, nuclear is going to be a necessity. When the choice comes down to nuclear or nothing, it won't be a choice at all, and the tree (stump) huggers will have to find something new to misunderstand and bitch about. However, I fully expect that we'll wait until we've got 5 years of exploitable oil left before building nuke stations in sufficient numbers. Better to start now, and this looks like a decent next step.
Re:I am not a nuclear physicist...
on
Fission in a Box
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· Score: 1
it seems like an awful lot of energy is being wasted in the current reactors
Depends what form you want your energy in. We tend to think of the electricity as being the good stuff, and the heat as the bad stuff, because we generally just radiate excess heat away to cool the steam/helium.
However, get this reactor small enough and you could heat domestic/industrial water with the excess, like they already do in Iceland with geothermal sinks.
The problem with Quake bots as an AI challenge is that you can give them perfect aim
Yup, that's the problem with most client/server games; they trust the client way too much. Don't get me started on peer to peer.
Contrast with netrek, where having perfect aim can actually be a liability. Bot and borg clients would fire perfect vector torp streams every time - only to have their human target dodge gracefully out of the way every time.
Re:What is "Bill S.1618 TITLE III" ?
on
Buried in email?
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· Score: 1
NEVER REPLY, at least, not to the sender. If you do, they'll keep your address on file
And incidentally, don't use a mailer that displays HTML email, because it's trivial to embed a tag that tickles a CGI that confirms you opened it. Try it, as an exercise for the reader.:)
Re:bogosity alert: the article contradicts itself!
on
Buried in email?
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· Score: 1
Never use Reply to All when a reply to the sender alone would do
Back in the day, I used to use email for communicating efficiently. Now I use it to cover my poor reamed out arse by bouncing idiotic messages back to "sender + boss". Good god, what else was it invented for?
"Cake in the breakroom [at the building across town]"
Being a satellite office, most of our messages are about a building 300 miles away. When asked about the possibility of setting up a separate mailing list, our IT guys' response is to go off and indulge in some heavy petting with their sisters. Actually, that's their response to everything, so it probably doesn't signify much.
It would be fun to load up Starcraft and go on BNet and start a game with someone and see if your computer program can beat them. Or even just playing your own AI to train it.
A lot of quake bots were written to do just that, and netrek used to be a great platform for competitive AI's before it got left behind in the last ice age.;)
The problem is that being good at a strategy game involves much more than the variables you list
Couldn't agree more. The B&W system is great for its own application, but it's just the back end driving a well defined set of gorgeous animations and sound effects and a neat physics engine. It's behaviour oriented, not success oriented.
In particular, using a state machine with all possible behaviour hardcoded would get you reamed in a competitive game. We can see that in the Command and Clones, where the AI's biggest asset is the sense of pity you feel for it.;)
That's aka Reinforcement Learning. For decision trees, the feedback is the "evidence" that the tree has to explain, so presumably his system saves some/all of the feedback and intermittently updates the decision tree
It's not even that complicated. The Creature uses a noddy state machine, tells you what state it's in (i.e. "hungry", "playful", "helpful"), performs an action, then waits a little after doing it. If you correct it, you're immediately effecting the last state transition check that it passed. You could implement it with one array of state transition values, a reference to the last one you passed, a "have corrected it" boolean, and a time to wait before entering the next state. It's a simple system, and it works extremely well. The strength is in the robustness of the design, and particularly in the presentation of it, and interface to it.
In my opinion, it not a CPU bottleneck that has kept AI at.1% of system resources, rather it's design time.
I couldn't agree less. The bottleneck is test/tweak time, when you verify that your clever PhD thesis design actually produces reasonable/fun/competitive results. The strength of B&W is that it went for a completely noddy decision system, and spent the time tweaking it, and presenting the results in a fun form.
I can't in all honesty see a flaw in this argument. Pop quiz: how many people who's income depends on GPL projects have kids and mortgages? Open Source is for idealists who have nothing to lose, and starting a college fund is the best cure for idealism that I know.
no one here is a goddamned farm animal that exists only for the purpose of providing for a master
Snap out of it. I pay 35% tax, my employer pays about 2%. I work in a cubicle "farm" (my employer even calls it that), and am treated like a disposable commodity. Occasionally a new regime goes through an "empowerment is neat" phase, but it never lasts long enough to allow me to actually get any training or career development. However, if I work really, really, hard, I'll get a carrot. My owner, on the other hand, will get to buy Hawaii.
I think history will regard the PlayStation 2 as a failure, when all is said and done.
It's said and done. Sony hate it; the development and supply problems, RDRAM cost and lack of games have made it a millstone for them. They're selling at way below cost to make up for the lack of decent titles, but lots of customers (especially in Japan) are just using them as DVD players and not buying any games. The high headline figures for console sales are exactly what Sony don't need.
For all these reasons, Sony are working frantically to get the PS3 to market ASAP so that they can actually start making some money on titles.
Is mentioning new features after the technical announcement WAY over board?
Personally, I loathe spam, and I'm glad to see Kozmo losing this case. However, in the case of actual technical announcements from a company that I'd voluntarily entered into a relationship with, I'd be fine with it.
Kozmo took an administrative email and then tacked on some advertising
Sorry, but they did nothing of the sort. They sent out an advert and tacked on a spurious administrative announcement. They knew exactly what they were doing, and got rightly reamed.
We had to scrap the old user accounts, so we e-mailled everybody. Under this kind of judgement, we'd have been considered spamming. What should I have done?
First, read the original email and the case arguments. And don't make the mistake of reading the email in the order Kozmo wanted it to appear; it wasn't a service announcement containing an incidental advert, it was an advert thinly disguised as a service announcement.
The only reason some people think this is OK with e-mail is because they pay a fixed rate per month
But you =r ISP pays by the byte to recieve the spam, and guess where the ISP gets its money from? Just because it doesn't appear on your bill doesn't mean you're not paying for it.
Gee, let's see. It's advertising a service, while asking "Can we advertise services to you?". That call that a service announcement, I call it spam with a twist.
Here's a short extract of something I wrote recently, which compares IP and phyiscal property
It appears to be a series of disjointed statements that fails to address the fundamental difference between objects and information.
We can't both have the keyboard that I typed these words on. If you take it away from me, I have less. But the words themselves exist on/. , on your PC, and on caches in between. And yet I still have them on my PC. So what exactly have I lost?
When the RIAA and MPAA talk about protecting intellectual property and moral rights, what they're actually lobbying for is special market protection for physical objects: CD's, DVD's, movie theatre seats. The whole crux of their argument is that information should be treated like objects, because if it isn't, they won't make as much money.
And note that they always phrase it as "we'll lose money", which acknowledges that their only argument against moving to online distribution is that they'd make less money! And they're right, because who'd pay twelve bucks to leech three good tracks and nine sucky ones from Napster? And yet we queue up to pay that much for the same mostly sucky information on a 20 cent CD object, and we do it because our choice is to get reamed, or get lost.
Instead of competing to make and sell good music in a convenient way at a fair price, the industry colludes to force us to buy objects padded with complete dross. They know information isn't like objects, and they don't even attempt to deny it, they just bribe politicians to ban traffic in the information itself, because, hey, that would hurt their stock options, and geeez, that can't be right.
Slashdot Mirror
Then let's share. Being male, and having a pulse, I, Colin MacDonald quite like porn. I enjoy looking at quality animations (>300kbs, sound please) of nekkid ladies. I mean, why else would I pay for a broadband connection?
Whenever I get the regular whinging "Why's nobody using our portal?" survey from my ISP, I tell them the bare nekkid truth that a selection of high quality reviewed porn content would do wonders for their hit rate. They already know it's true, but it'll take some honesty from me and thee to convince their suits that it's OK to admit that news tickers and lame special offers aren't where the money is.
And to get back on topic, at least if I'm watching porn, it's stopping "Slay-O-Rama IV" from warping mah frajal little mahnd, right? ;)
Games are an easy target, because you can pick a title to demonize: "After Little Andy went postal, I realised that he'd been playing 'Schoolyard Slut-O-Rama Slayfest IV' for six hours a day every day for months. I should never have been allowed to purchase that game for him!"
Er, TOC? The protocol AOL published expliticly for 3rd party clients to use?
From the GAIM site.
Does anyone have a link to the actual TOC specification so that we can check this? There used to be info at http://www.aim.aol.com/tik , but that's vanished (quelle surprise).
Which is true, but signifies nothing. Those with experience in the industry also know that most purchasing decisions are made by inbred IT goons who base their buys on brochures, kickbacks, and (mostly useless) support and SLA promises.
What's with all the cognitive dissonance? AOL voluntarily have provided TOC for 3rd party clients to use. They've explicitely OK'd 3rd party clients. I don't understand where the confusion is coming from.
Please read the article before trying for a first post.
AOL volutarily provided TOC, an open interface to their system for 3rd party clients to use. It's since been left to rot, but until they remove it, they have no "Get orrf moi LAAAAN" argument.
That's pretty short sighted for people who should be thinking 100,000 years or so down the line. Or am I being naive? I know our current strategy is to bury nuke waste with a "Do not open until Christmas 102,001AD" sign on it, but I'd like to believe that someone in the nuke industry is thinking beyond their next set of stock options.
How long are hydrocarbon fossil fuels (coal, oil, gas) going to last? 500 years? 100? 50? 20? And when they go, what's the population going to be? 10 billion? 50 billion? Where's the space for wind/wave/solar/GM alcohol crop farms going to come from, considering that we're currently hacking down the last of the rainforest to make Mooby Burgers.
In the mid term, nuclear is going to be a necessity. When the choice comes down to nuclear or nothing, it won't be a choice at all, and the tree (stump) huggers will have to find something new to misunderstand and bitch about. However, I fully expect that we'll wait until we've got 5 years of exploitable oil left before building nuke stations in sufficient numbers. Better to start now, and this looks like a decent next step.
Depends what form you want your energy in. We tend to think of the electricity as being the good stuff, and the heat as the bad stuff, because we generally just radiate excess heat away to cool the steam/helium.
However, get this reactor small enough and you could heat domestic/industrial water with the excess, like they already do in Iceland with geothermal sinks.
Yup, that's the problem with most client/server games; they trust the client way too much. Don't get me started on peer to peer.
Contrast with netrek, where having perfect aim can actually be a liability. Bot and borg clients would fire perfect vector torp streams every time - only to have their human target dodge gracefully out of the way every time.
And incidentally, don't use a mailer that displays HTML email, because it's trivial to embed a tag that tickles a CGI that confirms you opened it. Try it, as an exercise for the reader. :)
Back in the day, I used to use email for communicating efficiently. Now I use it to cover my poor reamed out arse by bouncing idiotic messages back to "sender + boss". Good god, what else was it invented for?
Being a satellite office, most of our messages are about a building 300 miles away. When asked about the possibility of setting up a separate mailing list, our IT guys' response is to go off and indulge in some heavy petting with their sisters. Actually, that's their response to everything, so it probably doesn't signify much.
A lot of quake bots were written to do just that, and netrek used to be a great platform for competitive AI's before it got left behind in the last ice age. ;)
Couldn't agree more. The B&W system is great for its own application, but it's just the back end driving a well defined set of gorgeous animations and sound effects and a neat physics engine. It's behaviour oriented, not success oriented.
In particular, using a state machine with all possible behaviour hardcoded would get you reamed in a competitive game. We can see that in the Command and Clones, where the AI's biggest asset is the sense of pity you feel for it. ;)
It's not even that complicated. The Creature uses a noddy state machine, tells you what state it's in (i.e. "hungry", "playful", "helpful"), performs an action, then waits a little after doing it. If you correct it, you're immediately effecting the last state transition check that it passed. You could implement it with one array of state transition values, a reference to the last one you passed, a "have corrected it" boolean, and a time to wait before entering the next state. It's a simple system, and it works extremely well. The strength is in the robustness of the design, and particularly in the presentation of it, and interface to it.
I couldn't agree less. The bottleneck is test/tweak time, when you verify that your clever PhD thesis design actually produces reasonable/fun/competitive results. The strength of B&W is that it went for a completely noddy decision system, and spent the time tweaking it, and presenting the results in a fun form.
I can't in all honesty see a flaw in this argument. Pop quiz: how many people who's income depends on GPL projects have kids and mortgages? Open Source is for idealists who have nothing to lose, and starting a college fund is the best cure for idealism that I know.
Snap out of it. I pay 35% tax, my employer pays about 2%. I work in a cubicle "farm" (my employer even calls it that), and am treated like a disposable commodity. Occasionally a new regime goes through an "empowerment is neat" phase, but it never lasts long enough to allow me to actually get any training or career development. However, if I work really, really, hard, I'll get a carrot. My owner, on the other hand, will get to buy Hawaii.
I think history will regard the PlayStation 2 as a failure, when all is said and done.
It's said and done. Sony hate it; the development and supply problems, RDRAM cost and lack of games have made it a millstone for them. They're selling at way below cost to make up for the lack of decent titles, but lots of customers (especially in Japan) are just using them as DVD players and not buying any games. The high headline figures for console sales are exactly what Sony don't need.
For all these reasons, Sony are working frantically to get the PS3 to market ASAP so that they can actually start making some money on titles.
Is mentioning new features after the technical announcement WAY over board?
Personally, I loathe spam, and I'm glad to see Kozmo losing this case. However, in the case of actual technical announcements from a company that I'd voluntarily entered into a relationship with, I'd be fine with it.
Kozmo took an administrative email and then tacked on some advertising
Sorry, but they did nothing of the sort. They sent out an advert and tacked on a spurious administrative announcement. They knew exactly what they were doing, and got rightly reamed.
We had to scrap the old user accounts, so we e-mailled everybody. Under this kind of judgement, we'd have been considered spamming. What should I have done?
First, read the original email and the case arguments. And don't make the mistake of reading the email in the order Kozmo wanted it to appear; it wasn't a service announcement containing an incidental advert, it was an advert thinly disguised as a service announcement.
The only reason some people think this is OK with e-mail is because they pay a fixed rate per month
But you =r ISP pays by the byte to recieve the spam, and guess where the ISP gets its money from? Just because it doesn't appear on your bill doesn't mean you're not paying for it.
How is this spam?
Gee, let's see. It's advertising a service, while asking "Can we advertise services to you?". That call that a service announcement, I call it spam with a twist.
Here's a short extract of something I wrote recently, which compares IP and phyiscal property
It appears to be a series of disjointed statements that fails to address the fundamental difference between objects and information.
We can't both have the keyboard that I typed these words on. If you take it away from me, I have less. But the words themselves exist on /. , on your PC, and on caches in between. And yet I still have them on my PC. So what exactly have I lost?
When the RIAA and MPAA talk about protecting intellectual property and moral rights, what they're actually lobbying for is special market protection for physical objects: CD's, DVD's, movie theatre seats. The whole crux of their argument is that information should be treated like objects, because if it isn't, they won't make as much money.
And note that they always phrase it as "we'll lose money", which acknowledges that their only argument against moving to online distribution is that they'd make less money! And they're right, because who'd pay twelve bucks to leech three good tracks and nine sucky ones from Napster? And yet we queue up to pay that much for the same mostly sucky information on a 20 cent CD object, and we do it because our choice is to get reamed, or get lost.
Instead of competing to make and sell good music in a convenient way at a fair price, the industry colludes to force us to buy objects padded with complete dross. They know information isn't like objects, and they don't even attempt to deny it, they just bribe politicians to ban traffic in the information itself, because, hey, that would hurt their stock options, and geeez, that can't be right.