No, but it'd still be cool, even if you couldn't sell your managers. You could probably get the software alone, I'll have to play around with configurator to find out. And, I've had a couple managers that might have bought it if they thought it'd save them a couple grand.
I always wanted to go the opposite way, though: Run a PIX for my desktop. The damn things never get outdated, though. Worst case scenario is that they just get shipped off to a remote site, so I've never had the chance:(
I didn't see where he mounted it in his pictures, and I haven't seen any motherboards that have the mounting socket for the flash like the PIX's I've taken apart. Is there a PCI card to do this, or is Cisco using something other than the pcmcia-like flash cards in the new PIX's?
I thought reverse engineering a platform to get it to run someone else's software was legal. He didn't even have to reverse engineer any proprietary hardware, everything is off the shelf.
Stealing the components is illegal, but buying them and putting them together is perfectly legal.
How did Compaq get started, and why isn't my PC made by IBM?
The use of ISP in the suit is misleading. The people they are suing are AOL and CompuServe's ISPs.
The RIAA isn't suing these companies for giving web connectivity to an offending site, nor are they suing for providing internet access to end users who are downloading copyrighted material. Instead, they are suing utility companies, backbone providers. These companies are required by law to allow anyone access to their backbones, just like long distance providers. Qwest is getting investigated because people are complaining they are making it too hard to access their network. Yet, here comes the RIAA, trying to hold these carriers liable for traffic across their backbones. Can the carriers even do that legally?
Actually in that area of Ohio, the small town newspapers need to manufacture stories to get any interesting local news:)
Gotta go with the Lima news. Growing up in St. Marys I thought of that as the Big City newspaper some people would get, and the Dayton Daily News was up there with the Wall Street Journal.
As an aside, I wonder how many people reading that know the proper pronunciation of Lima, or Russia or Versailles?
Of course, with AWACS coordination and AIM-120 AMRAAMS the MiG-29s and Su-27s would likely be smouldering craters long before American fighters entered the detection range of those passive infrared sensors.
Not to say the russian fighters aren't good, they can fly rings around F-15s and -16s, it's that the Americans developed their longer randged radar while the Russians did some impressive stuff with shorter ranged infrared.
Of course, with the reunification of Germany, it'd be interesting to see the MiGs upgraded with western electronics.
We used a degausser to destroy old harddrives at a company I used to work for, and all of us ran our drivers licenses through it, just for the fun of it. Of course, I've lived in BFE since then and haven't run into anyone who tried to scan it yet, so I don't know how they'll react.
Running a cellphone through the degausser is pretty fun to, just make sure it's still under warranty:)
Ummm, a U.S. passport is cannon as ID, even in Minnesota. To get a job, you need two forms of ID _or_ a passport, even in MN.
Whether or not the minimum wager working the checkout lane (or thier supervisor,for that matter) knows this is another story, and arguing with them over forms of ID isn't likely to get you anywhere. Isn't it funny that a 7-11 won't take a form of ID that is good enough for a sovereign nation?
As for state ID cards, I know nothing about them, but isn't there some law or such that says a state must recognize identification issued by any other state?
Actually, you have a really good point. In sending a real world summons, don't they have to physically hand _you_ the summons. They can't mail it, even certified, can they? Email is less private than your mailbox, it's a federal crime to go through someone's mailbox, but there are no laws against reading someone's email, especially if sent to a work address.
Sounds like an excuse for lawyers to get lazy and cheap when delivering summons'. You can find who owns an URL, and whoever owns it ought to know who runs it. Under todays laws, isn't the URL owner responsible for the content.
Whay wasn't this taken up with ICANN, anyway. Looks like a domain dispute to me.
Hell, _I_ was more than a little taken aback first time I saw that one. Cool thing was, it wasn't gratuitous (sp?), it wasn't like something you'd see on Stern, it fit into the plot well.
That would be a good idea. It would put the animation meant for little kids on a separate channel from the anime stuff making it more reasonable to do a lot less editing. They wouldn't have to worry about when little joey sneaks downstairs at night and hits the channel he usually watches "Courage the Cowardly Dog" on and instead gets Faye of "Cowboy Bebop'leaning over a table ripping some guy's shirt off because she thinks he has a tattoo of a snake. I have a feeling that's a significant part of why CN keeps editing their late nite blocks. After all, it's still a child-centric network.
Whether this is economically feasable, however, is another story.
I agree to an extent. The monsters in FPS's could be improved by allowing them to take more factors into account in their tactics. For example, pop out from cover for quick pot shots as long as the opponent stays in one area, but move to a different position if he gets hit or almost hit twice in a row, or stand in the open and blast away when the opponent is carrying a knife, but when he switches to a BFG, get under cover and attempt an ambush.
I'm not a developer, but I think to do this, you need to get the monster to follow a set of rules. The monster acts in a certain manner until something happens, then it re-evaluates the situation and begins to behave in an appropriate manner.
For example, if a monster begins an engagement by popping out of cover, blasting the opponent, and diving back under cover, several things may happen. The tactic might be successful and he can keep blasting until the player is dead. He pops out and is immediately hit by the player. He pops out and the player is nowhere to be seen. He pops out and he sees the player running away or ducking behind cover of his own. He pops out and the player is nose to nose with him. These are the events the developer needs to make to bot recognize and adapt to. Furthermore, there are likely to be qualifiers to make the bot behave differently in response to the same event: The bot's health, how much damage the opponent has taken, what weapons are available to the bot, what weapons the opponent is using, what type of terrain is the bot in, what is the bot's mission (kill the player, defend a location, find the player, delay him, etc...) After the developer determines these, he makes rules for the bot to follow; when in x situation and y happens, with a,b, and c modifiers do this, or with e,f, andg g modifiers do that.
In theory I think this method could produce very effective bots, but there would be a direct correlation between the time the developer spent coming up with possible situations and respoonses to the quality of the bot. There are probably quite a few problem with a bot made in this way. First, it potentionally requires a computationally intense decision process every time anything happens. Next, it requires the developer to spend a lot of time just coming up with the large number of rules necessary to provide a decent amount of tactical flexibility, let alone implement them. Also, many of the monster would need to be tweaked or individualized even further because, even if they are tough to beat, monsters that act the same way all the time still get repetetive. Also, I don't think the moajority of the monsters in a game should be all that good. Imagine trying to work your way through Half-Life if ALL the monsters were as good as the average human? It might not be so important now, but this would require a large amount of memory and storage for tables of rules. Most importantly, again, is that the monsters will require a lot of work on the part of the developer to get a large enough set of rules to first make monsters adaptable to different situations, but to give them multiple reactions to each different situation. After all, if the emonster reacts the same way each time it gets into a certain situation, we get back to the original problem of humans being able to adapt to something and bots not.
I think this method may, theoretically at least, be able to produce bots that can react to situations almost as well as average players at least, given enough groundwork is done by the developer. I have no idea how it would be implimented, or even if it could be, though. If I were a programmer, it would be fun to try, though. And, adding teamwork to the bots would probably increase the complexity exponentially.
Yeeeaaaahhhhh, sorta, but what I remember of the theory I from college, it doesn't apply to the flowing, loosely defined world of FPS's very well.
What I remember of game theory is that it is concerned with making decisions between set options to come to an acceptable outcome, and other people, their decisions, and their acceptable outcomes may or may not be taken into account. I know this is very vague and simplistic, but I don't have access to any books at the moment for a more concise and possibly accurate defination.
I see it more directly applicable to strategy games like chess. If I move my rook here, how likely is he to take it with his night allowing me to take his bishop with a pawn, and is it worth it at this point in the game. Brute force simulation may achieve the same or better effects against average Chess players on a PC, but more complicated strategy games (say an Axis and Allies implimentation) may have too many variables to simply simulate out all options to the Nth move and choose the best one.
In the fast paced flowing situation of an FPS, I doubt this type of calculation is feasable. Also, I don't know of anything on game theory that would suggest coming up with new ideas, it is about choosing between different options.
Where I do see an application for game theory is in the design of the AI: in giving it options and what the criteria to base the choices between those options are. As a monster, how important is it to me to, A: stay alive; B: Kill the player; C: prevent the player from accomplishing a certain goal; and D: how well do I work with other monsters? The developer them develops sets of tactics and determines how they relate to the monsters' motivations. For values of A between 0 and 50, group 1 tactics (j,k,l) are preferred, group 2 tactics (m,n,p) are neutral, and group 3 tactics (q,r,s) are right out. For values of A betrween 51 and 75, group 1 tactics are neutral, group 2 are preferred, and group 3 are neutral... etc. for all variables. Then, when an engagement is about to happen, the AI can say this monster has scores of A=52, B=37, C=89, and D=92, so tactics x,r, and j are preferred, and l,m,s and v are acceptable, but j,s, and v only apply underwater. Therefore we will give x and r each a 40% chance, and give l and m each a 10% chance, generate a random number and pick a winner. For the rest of the fight, we just follow the rules of the chosen tactic and get blown to hell by Gorden Freeman anyway. So yeah, game theory probably can be used in the context of an FPS, but in a stricter sense it is probably better applied in the design of the AI/bots in the game, and most likely, it is applied in the design of all the games we run into. More accurately maybe, it describes what the designer is doing when he designs his AI. Whether a better understanding of the theory would lead to better AI's, I really don't know.
Game theory is a really interesting and helpful at analyzong real world problems, but has little or nothing to do with games as we know them. It has more to do with why someone always gets picked last at kickball than how to play SimFarm.
Personally, I think that though using a game style interface to simulations may make them more accessible or easy to understand, I doubt that "the establishment" will take anything seriously that is related to a passtime, at least for quite a while.
when they are either followed or capable of being enforced.
The internet is a medium where we can vote a referendum without going to the polls. No matter what the courts or congress decide, music will be shared. Napster may be dead, but we now have Gnutella.
I just realized something. You always hear that you need to "do something about it," implying voting or writing your congressman about an issue. We need to "speak up." Well, it occurred to me that we are saying something, we're lobbying in our own way All the millions of people out there sharing information freely are saying "I believe this should be available to me, in this format, at this price." We just aren't talking in the way congress, the government, and the industry wants to listen to.
> So you can't redistribute DLLs from the SDK with
> your application if you used emacs, gcc, linux
> or mozilla *even as tools* in the production of
> your application. That's the unreasonable part
This appears to be an attempt to protect themselves from becoming subject to the GPL license. Or, at least to increase their FUD and underscore question 5 in their "gpl_faq.doc":
5. Can you develop applications for a GPL program, like Linux, without subjecting those applications to the GPL?
Another thing, they warn that the GPL explicitly states that the software won't necessarily work, but so does every Microsoft EULA, and that explicit non-warranty is something MS is lobbying to get Congress to pass as law.
The difference between the two licenses in that regard I can see is that if Microsoft's software doesn't work, you get the privelege of paying them $300 an hour for tech support, while under the GPL license you're sidled with the source itself, and the explicit right to fix it. Gee, I can see why no end user would want to use a GPL's product.
Wasn't the post you were responding to about using MIRVs as kinetic weapons? If so, they are designed to survive reentry, and are much denser and present a smaller cross section than, say, a person. They should have a significantly higher terminal velocity than your average skydiver.
I don't know exactly what the velocity might be, but it would probably be quite fast. A tennis ball weighing a little less than a pound falls at the same rate as a skydiver (roughly 180ft/sec), how fast would an object weighing several hundred pounds presenting a cross section significantly smaller than a person's fall?
As for actually hitting a tank, I doubt something designed to destroy a city was designed wit that kind of accuracy.
Slashdot Mirror
>So it doesn't win you anything ;-)
:(
No, but it'd still be cool, even if you couldn't sell your managers. You could probably get the software alone, I'll have to play around with configurator to find out. And, I've had a couple managers that might have bought it if they thought it'd save them a couple grand.
I always wanted to go the opposite way, though: Run a PIX for my desktop. The damn things never get outdated, though. Worst case scenario is that they just get shipped off to a remote site, so I've never had the chance
I didn't see where he mounted it in his pictures, and I haven't seen any motherboards that have the mounting socket for the flash like the PIX's I've taken apart. Is there a PCI card to do this, or is Cisco using something other than the pcmcia-like flash cards in the new PIX's?
I thought reverse engineering a platform to get it to run someone else's software was legal. He didn't even have to reverse engineer any proprietary hardware, everything is off the shelf.
Stealing the components is illegal, but buying them and putting them together is perfectly legal.
How did Compaq get started, and why isn't my PC made by IBM?
The use of ISP in the suit is misleading. The people they are suing are AOL and CompuServe's ISPs.
The RIAA isn't suing these companies for giving web connectivity to an offending site, nor are they suing for providing internet access to end users who are downloading copyrighted material. Instead, they are suing utility companies, backbone providers. These companies are required by law to allow anyone access to their backbones, just like long distance providers. Qwest is getting investigated because people are complaining they are making it too hard to access their network. Yet, here comes the RIAA, trying to hold these carriers liable for traffic across their backbones. Can the carriers even do that legally?
Actually in that area of Ohio, the small town newspapers need to manufacture stories to get any interesting local news :)
Gotta go with the Lima news. Growing up in St. Marys I thought of that as the Big City newspaper some people would get, and the Dayton Daily News was up there with the Wall Street Journal.
As an aside, I wonder how many people reading that know the proper pronunciation of Lima, or Russia or Versailles?
Just what real world perspective do you think applies to the article you responded to?
Of course, with AWACS coordination and AIM-120 AMRAAMS the MiG-29s and Su-27s would likely be smouldering craters long before American fighters entered the detection range of those passive infrared sensors.
Not to say the russian fighters aren't good, they can fly rings around F-15s and -16s, it's that the Americans developed their longer randged radar while the Russians did some impressive stuff with shorter ranged infrared.
Of course, with the reunification of Germany, it'd be interesting to see the MiGs upgraded with western electronics.
We used a degausser to destroy old harddrives at a company I used to work for, and all of us ran our drivers licenses through it, just for the fun of it. Of course, I've lived in BFE since then and haven't run into anyone who tried to scan it yet, so I don't know how they'll react.
:)
Running a cellphone through the degausser is pretty fun to, just make sure it's still under warranty
Ummm, a U.S. passport is cannon as ID, even in Minnesota. To get a job, you need two forms of ID _or_ a passport, even in MN.
Whether or not the minimum wager working the checkout lane (or thier supervisor,for that matter) knows this is another story, and arguing with them over forms of ID isn't likely to get you anywhere. Isn't it funny that a 7-11 won't take a form of ID that is good enough for a sovereign nation?
As for state ID cards, I know nothing about them, but isn't there some law or such that says a state must recognize identification issued by any other state?
Actually, you have a really good point. In sending a real world summons, don't they have to physically hand _you_ the summons. They can't mail it, even certified, can they? Email is less private than your mailbox, it's a federal crime to go through someone's mailbox, but there are no laws against reading someone's email, especially if sent to a work address.
Sounds like an excuse for lawyers to get lazy and cheap when delivering summons'. You can find who owns an URL, and whoever owns it ought to know who runs it. Under todays laws, isn't the URL owner responsible for the content.
Whay wasn't this taken up with ICANN, anyway. Looks like a domain dispute to me.
You mean, will it run Counter-Strike server?
Hell, _I_ was more than a little taken aback first time I saw that one. Cool thing was, it wasn't gratuitous (sp?), it wasn't like something you'd see on Stern, it fit into the plot well.
That would be a good idea. It would put the animation meant for little kids on a separate channel from the anime stuff making it more reasonable to do a lot less editing. They wouldn't have to worry about when little joey sneaks downstairs at night and hits the channel he usually watches "Courage the Cowardly Dog" on and instead gets Faye of "Cowboy Bebop'leaning over a table ripping some guy's shirt off because she thinks he has a tattoo of a snake. I have a feeling that's a significant part of why CN keeps editing their late nite blocks. After all, it's still a child-centric network.
Whether this is economically feasable, however, is another story.
I agree to an extent. The monsters in FPS's could be improved by allowing them to take more factors into account in their tactics. For example, pop out from cover for quick pot shots as long as the opponent stays in one area, but move to a different position if he gets hit or almost hit twice in a row, or stand in the open and blast away when the opponent is carrying a knife, but when he switches to a BFG, get under cover and attempt an ambush.
I'm not a developer, but I think to do this, you need to get the monster to follow a set of rules. The monster acts in a certain manner until something happens, then it re-evaluates the situation and begins to behave in an appropriate manner.
For example, if a monster begins an engagement by popping out of cover, blasting the opponent, and diving back under cover, several things may happen. The tactic might be successful and he can keep blasting until the player is dead. He pops out and is immediately hit by the player. He pops out and the player is nowhere to be seen. He pops out and he sees the player running away or ducking behind cover of his own. He pops out and the player is nose to nose with him. These are the events the developer needs to make to bot recognize and adapt to. Furthermore, there are likely to be qualifiers to make the bot behave differently in response to the same event: The bot's health, how much damage the opponent has taken, what weapons are available to the bot, what weapons the opponent is using, what type of terrain is the bot in, what is the bot's mission (kill the player, defend a location, find the player, delay him, etc...) After the developer determines these, he makes rules for the bot to follow; when in x situation and y happens, with a,b, and c modifiers do this, or with e,f, andg g modifiers do that.
In theory I think this method could produce very effective bots, but there would be a direct correlation between the time the developer spent coming up with possible situations and respoonses to the quality of the bot. There are probably quite a few problem with a bot made in this way. First, it potentionally requires a
computationally intense decision process every time anything happens. Next, it requires the developer to spend a lot of time just coming up with the large number of rules necessary to provide a decent amount of tactical flexibility, let alone implement them. Also, many of the monster would need to be tweaked or individualized even further because, even if they are tough to beat, monsters that act the same way all the time still get repetetive. Also, I don't think the moajority of the monsters in a game should be all that good. Imagine trying to work your way through Half-Life if ALL the monsters were as good as the average human? It might not be so important now, but this would require a large amount of memory and storage for tables of rules. Most importantly, again, is that the monsters will require a lot of work on the part of the developer to get a large enough set of rules to first make monsters adaptable to different situations, but to give them multiple reactions to each different situation. After all, if the emonster reacts the same way each time it gets into a certain situation, we get back to the original problem of humans being able to adapt to something and bots not.
I think this method may, theoretically at least, be able to produce bots that can react to situations almost as well as average players at least, given enough groundwork is done by the developer. I have no idea how it would be implimented, or even if it could be, though. If I were a programmer, it would be fun to try, though. And, adding teamwork to the bots would probably increase the complexity exponentially.
Yeeeaaaahhhhh, sorta, but what I remember of the theory I from college, it doesn't apply to the flowing, loosely defined world of FPS's very well.
What I remember of game theory is that it is concerned with making decisions between set options to come to an acceptable outcome, and other people, their decisions, and their acceptable outcomes may or may not be taken into account. I know this is very vague and simplistic, but I don't have access to any books at the moment for a more concise and possibly accurate defination.
I see it more directly applicable to strategy games like chess. If I move my rook here, how likely is he to take it with his night allowing me to take his bishop with a pawn, and is it worth it at this point in the game. Brute force simulation may achieve the same or better effects against average Chess players on a PC, but more complicated strategy games (say an Axis and Allies implimentation) may have too many variables to simply simulate out all options to the Nth move and choose the best one.
In the fast paced flowing situation of an FPS, I doubt this type of calculation is feasable. Also, I don't know of anything on game theory that would suggest coming up with new ideas, it is about choosing between different options.
Where I do see an application for game theory is in the design of the AI: in giving it options and what the criteria to base the choices between those options are. As a monster, how important is it to me to, A: stay alive; B: Kill the player; C: prevent the player from accomplishing a certain goal; and D: how well do I work with other monsters? The developer them develops sets of tactics and determines how they relate to the monsters' motivations. For values of A between 0 and 50, group 1 tactics (j,k,l) are preferred, group 2 tactics (m,n,p) are neutral, and group 3 tactics (q,r,s) are right out. For values of A betrween 51 and 75, group 1 tactics are neutral, group 2 are preferred, and group 3 are neutral... etc. for all variables. Then, when an engagement is about to happen, the AI can say this monster has scores of A=52, B=37, C=89, and D=92, so tactics x,r, and j are preferred, and l,m,s and v are acceptable, but j,s, and v only apply underwater. Therefore we will give x and r each a 40% chance, and give l and m each a 10% chance, generate a random number and pick a winner. For the rest of the fight, we just follow the rules of the chosen tactic and get blown to hell by Gorden Freeman anyway. So yeah, game theory probably can be used in the context of an FPS, but in a stricter sense it is probably better applied in the design of the AI/bots in the game, and most likely, it is applied in the design of all the games we run into. More accurately maybe, it describes what the designer is doing when he designs his AI. Whether a better understanding of the theory would lead to better AI's, I really don't know.
Game theory is a really interesting and helpful at analyzong real world problems, but has little or nothing to do with games as we know them. It has more to do with why someone always gets picked last at kickball than how to play SimFarm.
Personally, I think that though using a game style interface to simulations may make them more accessible or easy to understand, I doubt that "the establishment" will take anything seriously that is related to a passtime, at least for quite a while.
This will let us pay more farmers not to grow crops so they don't have to sell their farms to big corporations or turn them into housing developments.
when they are either followed or capable of being enforced.
The internet is a medium where we can vote a referendum without going to the polls. No matter what the courts or congress decide, music will be shared. Napster may be dead, but we now have Gnutella.
I just realized something. You always hear that you need to "do something about it," implying voting or writing your congressman about an issue. We need to "speak up." Well, it occurred to me that we are saying something, we're lobbying in our own way All the millions of people out there sharing information freely are saying "I believe this should be available to me, in this format, at this price." We just aren't talking in the way congress, the government, and the industry wants to listen to.
> So you can't redistribute DLLs from the SDK with > your application if you used emacs, gcc, linux > or mozilla *even as tools* in the production of > your application. That's the unreasonable part This appears to be an attempt to protect themselves from becoming subject to the GPL license. Or, at least to increase their FUD and underscore question 5 in their "gpl_faq.doc": 5. Can you develop applications for a GPL program, like Linux, without subjecting those applications to the GPL? Another thing, they warn that the GPL explicitly states that the software won't necessarily work, but so does every Microsoft EULA, and that explicit non-warranty is something MS is lobbying to get Congress to pass as law. The difference between the two licenses in that regard I can see is that if Microsoft's software doesn't work, you get the privelege of paying them $300 an hour for tech support, while under the GPL license you're sidled with the source itself, and the explicit right to fix it. Gee, I can see why no end user would want to use a GPL's product.
Wasn't the post you were responding to about using MIRVs as kinetic weapons? If so, they are designed to survive reentry, and are much denser and present a smaller cross section than, say, a person. They should have a significantly higher terminal velocity than your average skydiver. I don't know exactly what the velocity might be, but it would probably be quite fast. A tennis ball weighing a little less than a pound falls at the same rate as a skydiver (roughly 180ft/sec), how fast would an object weighing several hundred pounds presenting a cross section significantly smaller than a person's fall? As for actually hitting a tank, I doubt something designed to destroy a city was designed wit that kind of accuracy.