Red Hat GAINED a much larger loyal user base in releasing Fedora than they EVER had with Red Hat Linux. Let's not try to paint events to match your hurt feelings (presuming that that's why you're upset, I could be wrong).
"Though there are about a dozen games that have directly influenced Magic in one way or another, the game's most influential ancestor..."
Sigh, obviously you're taking this WAY too seriously, but here's the deal: read your original post, and assume you don't know what CE is, but you've heard of Magic (that's certainly more common than people who have heard of both or only CE). Now try to imagine what you would take away from that. To me it reads like CE is some kind of pre-cursor to Magic, and I think that's a sad way to look at CE. It also doesn't explain why anyone would want to play it.
Hence my reply and clarification, which you seem to have taken as some kind of attack against the merits of your posting to Slashdot at all.
Do you like CE? I do, so let's just agree that it's fun and play it together some day, ok?
PS: Yes, I have read that bit from R.G. before, and yes I knew CE influenced Magic, and R.G. liked it a lot.
"Cosmic Encounter, which was the inspiration for Richard Garfield to create Magic: The Gathering"
Not really. It inspired an element of the game, but so did D&D. CE has noting to do with Magic other than the fact that they share the rule: any rule printed on a game card overrides the core rules.
CE is
SF, not fantasy
not collectable
a board game with cards involved, not a card game
combat AND politics, not just combat
So, no, not really well summed up as "the inspiration [...] to create Magic".
I run a monthly board-gaming day, and there are NO END of good choices. Here are some categories with examples:
True "board" games
Cosmic Encounter - the new one is not as good as the original, but still excellent
Robo Rally - The programmers board-game. This is tons of fun, and can be a huge, days-long event or an hour-long game depending on how you set it up
Titan - The mother of all day-long strategy games. Fun, but harsh!
Non-Collectable Card Games
Chez Geek/Dork/etc. - This is a fun and funny line of games which I recommend to anyone living in a dorm or group house of any sort!
Munchkin - A great game (and line of spin-offs) which pokes fun at fantasy role-playing.
Flux - This is a wild game, but not very serious. Lots of fun once in a while
Collectable Games
Dungeons & Dragons Miniatures - The new minis game they put out a couple years ago is going strong and lots of fun from what I hear (I buy them for a D&D game I run, not the collectable game)
Shadowfist - I keep hearing about this card game, and everyone says it's the best many-player game ever.
Games on the Net
New Eleusis - A fun game for people who like puzzles. You just need cards and something to keep score on.
Heh, I always get a kick out of this message. It's not the same person, but someone always says, "I use spam filter X, and it's great because it gets 99.mumble% of spam." It sounds good at first, because percentages are the wrong metric to use here.
99% of correctly identified spam is considered the entry point. If you can't at LEAST get that much, then you're worthless. If you can get that much, then you are in a position to improve and start getting a respectable amount of spam.
SpamAssassin uses several techniques to improve past this basic level of accuracy.
To give you a sense, yesterday I got 14,028 messages that moved through (or at least attempted to move through) my personal MTA (just two users). 153 of those were delivered as legitimate mail in theory (one was actually spam, unidentified).
Do the math. 99.65% would allow 49 spams through per day on my site! No thanks, I don't need Viagra that bad.
Yeah, looking it over it looks roughly the same. PDL incorporates much more on top of the primatives, but that could be seen as good or bad (personally, I'd prefer if much of PDL were broken off into seperate add-ons).
Thanks for the info. I imagine all high-level languages go through this process of figuring out how to balance abstraction with number-crunching. Good to see two camps come to roughly the same conclusions independently, as it offers some credibility to both.
Can someone who knows Numerical Python clue in those of us not familiar? Is this akin to Perl's PDL? Just curious. It's the first time I've come across the term.
In Perl, PDL is a wonderful tool, but it relies on some of those ancient fortran libraries that everyone (in the scientific community, anyway) has been dragging around since the dawn of time, and getting it to compile and install can be a bear.
If Numerical Python does essentially the same thing, and is slightly easier to get up and running, I might toy around with it.
Re:Please place your nerd membership in the garbag
on
Ask mc chris
·
· Score: 1
Oh for pity's sake let's not pretend that these are words that are anything but slang-gone-mainstream. geek and nerd are used interchangably. Heck, even dork (which refers to a psycology study of "latch key" or "door key" kids) is used interchangably with the above two. If you're looking for a language that is less dynamic than the dialect of English written on the Web, please feel free to resort to Church Latin.
The mere fact that some dictionary has deigned to list a word does not negate its custom of colloquial use (which, yes, often trumps archaic usages like using "geek" to refer to circus performers).
You can't buy such an honor because it's impossible to attain (at least for Bill). I'm not sure if naturalized citizens of GB can be called "Sir", but you can't be knighted at all if you're an American (or any other nationality) like Bill. As the article stated, you can be given an honorary title, but it's not the same thing at all. It pretty much just means that you've been honored by the crown.
"for Solaris to be considered truly open-source, they must open up development. That is what the grand-parent is trying to say."
I suggest that unless you know the OP, you stick to what they DID say:
"Sun best get their act together and encourage active open development of their platform if they ever want to catch up to the momentum of Linux."
This is a clear statement: they must do X (encourage active development) if they want Y (to catch up to the momentum of Linux). You can argue with the specifics, if you disagree, but please don't start bringing phrases like "to be considered truly open-source" into it as if that were what the OP was talking about.
"We don't measure HDs in Terabits . 1 Tbit = 128 GBytes or 128 gigs3"
YOU may not, but I assure you that those doing research into hard-drive platter manufacture do. What's more, this isn't a hard-drive platter, it's a random-access device, which are ALWAYS measured in bits, not bytes (except when labeling a product for the masses).
This is not a product, ready to ship, it's a prototype, and as such you're being exposed to the technical terminology of the industry that produces these devices, NOT the technical terminology of the industry that consumes them.
While not truly an algorithmic optimization, the old Apollo compilers got in some hot water with benchmarkers by recognizing when input code was identical to certain library functions, and substituting a call to the library code. One benchmark ran something like 100 times faster on Apollos than it did on Suns. Persoanlly, I thought it was valid, since it was a generic optimization that would have helped real user code (I think they were specifically replacing FFTs with a hand-tuned assembly version).
First off, someone please mod up the parent. Good reply, and I bow to obvious facts that contradict my statement.
However, your point about hubble is mis-placed. Hubble can't resolve this kind of image any better than ground-based AO scopes at this point (not because the atmosphere poses no obsticle, but because AO allows better than default resolution, and technology has advanced since Hubble was sent up).
As others have pointed out to me here on Slashdot, the reason that Hubble is useful is that certain wavelengths simply don't get through our atmosphere, so while pictures like the one you link to could be taken from the ground today, a great deal of research cannot.
Personally, I'd love to see a ground-based scope on the far side of the moon to replace hubble, but I'm probably just dreaming.
If the plane of the galaxy is exactly perpendicular to our line of sight, then you would observe no shift in a perfectly circular galaxy (I believe that most are eliptical, however).
For a circular galaxy, given the amount of shift that can be detected using modern equipment, you should be able to trivially construct the probability that any galaxy at a given distance would fall within the tolerance required. I suspect that it's a very small probability (on the order of so small we've probably never measured one such).
Either way, if you DO see spin, then it's not an issue.
If it was caught and channeled we wouldn't be able to see it. Cos it would be caught and channeled.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't that the grandparent's point?
Hrmm... the idea is sound, I guess. The galaxy is visible, but only in radio wavelenghts (by observing its hydrogen signature). It could be that the hydrogen we are observing is the interstellar hydrogen, and all (well, most, since it would only require decreasing the observable stellar density, not obscuring all stars) of the stars themselves are enclosed or otherwise having their output channeled. It's not a bad theory, but there are other, simpler theories (that might require that we revise our idea of how galaxies form a bit) that are worth checking out first.
There are a few mistakes in your conjectures. First off, we're not talking about "a star". You would most likely not be able to make out a single star in such a remote galaxy unless it were astoundingly bright.
What this tells us is that the density of visible stars in that galaxy (assuming a normal distribution of magnitudes) is low enough that we cannot detect any of them. Someone else care to do the math and tell us what that density threshold is?
When you see "stars" in distant galaxies like Andromeda, what you're really seeing are clusters of stars, though perhaps modern technology has allowed us to resolve single very bright stars, I'm not sure.
As for something blocking our view... that's unlikely, as the dark galaxy was detected by viewing its hydrogen signature in radio wavelengths, so there's no problem seeing it in the correct wavelength.
Most likely (my untrained opinion), this is a galaxy composed of either very small stars or very old (burned out) stars. I'm sure there are good models for describing either. In the first case, for example, I would think that a low initial density of stellar material (mostly hydrogen) would lead to the formation of smaller-than-average stars.
What I think this observation proves is that galactic magnitudes can dip below our viewing threshold in the visible spectrum, and therefore any estimates of the mass of the universe based on visual surveys can be discounted. This makes the closed theory of universal expansion far more likely (e.g. that the universe will expand to a certain point, and then begin to contract until it collapses back into a singularity from which a new Big Bang would arise).
Where it becomes a problem is when you attempt to steal customers in this way. For example, you would be well within your right to put up a site called slashdot.info and have as the main page, "[ad] [ad] [ad] Sorry, you typed slashdot.info [ad] and you probably meant [ad] to type slashdot.org [ad] [ad] [ad]".
You are providing a (questionably useful) service ad deriving advertising from it. Trademark law allows for this. When, on the other hand, you put up a site that looks exactly like Slashdot.org with your own ad revenue, but is at slashdot.info, then Slashdot would have every right to sue.
Honestly, I'm at a loss to understand the anger here. Even if you don't tell the poor sap where to go, this just seems like a silly thing to get upset about. It's not at all a zero-sum game, so relax and take a deep breath.
There's no need to do that, and it presents an opportunity for abuse (gives you a chance of defauding the vendor, though a small one).
This is "authorization", not "payment". The vendor will still submit a normal credit card transaction with the amount, and if the authroization does not match the amount, then the normal exception handling processes involved in insufficient funds transpire. None of that has to be new technology, and there's no reason to throw out working code.
The point is that without users having to communicate with banks directly, a simple browser plugin could make all online transactions totally secure, even in the face of a vendor who is out to cheat the customer. The vendor can still cheat after-the-fact (e.g. not send the goods), but the transaction itself is assured in so far as our cryptographic protocols are.
You could do it either way, but the vendor is going to get confirmation of the transaction from the bank. If the bank comes back and says, ok, self told me to give you $2, then vendor is going to report that you had insufficient funds and fail the transaction.
The reason to hide the information you're sending to the bank is that you might include other details in that request that the vendor should not see. If not, then it does not matter which path you choose.
Well, that's a full-body shot, but a much worse picture.
Overall, these are very impressive shots, and I have to say, I'm looking forward to this. None of what I hoped for is in it (in terms of really turning the plot back on itself and getting creative), but it looks like a lot of fun, and a good cap to what I think was a fairly slow-to-build initial pair of movies (no, I didn't hate them, and I do think that they were at least as good as Jedi... teen romance and cute aliens are just guaranteed to turn off most SF fans no matter what else you have to offer).
It's essentially saying that the ISP must provide a crime-reporting service for the police. What if I report child porn to my local real estate agent? Why aren't THEY required to provide this service as well?
Crimes should be reported to the police, not ISPs. If an ISP is made aware of a crime, and they feel the report has merit, they should notify the police, but I don't see a reason to specifically call out one crime and require that all reports must be forwarded to the police.
Worst case scenario, this law is highly vulnerable to denial of service attacks (I pity the ISP that someone decides to taunt in this way, and NO THIS IS NOT A SUGGESTION... PLEASE DON'T DO THAT).
Slashdot Mirror
Red Hat GAINED a much larger loyal user base in releasing Fedora than they EVER had with Red Hat Linux. Let's not try to paint events to match your hurt feelings (presuming that that's why you're upset, I could be wrong).
"Though there are about a dozen games that have directly influenced Magic in one way or another, the game's most influential ancestor..."
Sigh, obviously you're taking this WAY too seriously, but here's the deal: read your original post, and assume you don't know what CE is, but you've heard of Magic (that's certainly more common than people who have heard of both or only CE). Now try to imagine what you would take away from that. To me it reads like CE is some kind of pre-cursor to Magic, and I think that's a sad way to look at CE. It also doesn't explain why anyone would want to play it.
Hence my reply and clarification, which you seem to have taken as some kind of attack against the merits of your posting to Slashdot at all.
Do you like CE? I do, so let's just agree that it's fun and play it together some day, ok?
PS: Yes, I have read that bit from R.G. before, and yes I knew CE influenced Magic, and R.G. liked it a lot.
Not really. It inspired an element of the game, but so did D&D. CE has noting to do with Magic other than the fact that they share the rule: any rule printed on a game card overrides the core rules.
CE is
- SF, not fantasy
- not collectable
- a board game with cards involved, not a card game
- combat AND politics, not just combat
So, no, not really well summed up as "the inspiration [...] to create Magic".I run a monthly board-gaming day, and there are NO END of good choices. Here are some categories with examples:
True "board" games- Cosmic Encounter - the new one is not as good as the original, but still excellent
- Robo Rally - The programmers board-game. This is tons of fun, and can be a huge, days-long event or an hour-long game depending on how you set it up
- Titan - The mother of all day-long strategy games. Fun, but harsh!
Non-Collectable Card Games- Chez Geek/Dork/etc. - This is a fun and funny line of games which I recommend to anyone living in a dorm or group house of any sort!
- Munchkin - A great game (and line of spin-offs) which pokes fun at fantasy role-playing.
- Flux - This is a wild game, but not very serious. Lots of fun once in a while
Collectable Games- Dungeons & Dragons Miniatures - The new minis game they put out a couple years ago is going strong and lots of fun from what I hear (I buy them for a D&D game I run, not the collectable game)
- Shadowfist - I keep hearing about this card game, and everyone says it's the best many-player game ever.
Games on the Net- New Eleusis - A fun game for people who like puzzles. You just need cards and something to keep score on.
Enjoy!Heh, I always get a kick out of this message. It's not the same person, but someone always says, "I use spam filter X, and it's great because it gets 99.mumble% of spam." It sounds good at first, because percentages are the wrong metric to use here.
99% of correctly identified spam is considered the entry point. If you can't at LEAST get that much, then you're worthless. If you can get that much, then you are in a position to improve and start getting a respectable amount of spam.
SpamAssassin uses several techniques to improve past this basic level of accuracy.
To give you a sense, yesterday I got 14,028 messages that moved through (or at least attempted to move through) my personal MTA (just two users). 153 of those were delivered as legitimate mail in theory (one was actually spam, unidentified).
Do the math. 99.65% would allow 49 spams through per day on my site! No thanks, I don't need Viagra that bad.
Yeah, looking it over it looks roughly the same. PDL incorporates much more on top of the primatives, but that could be seen as good or bad (personally, I'd prefer if much of PDL were broken off into seperate add-ons).
Thanks for the info. I imagine all high-level languages go through this process of figuring out how to balance abstraction with number-crunching. Good to see two camps come to roughly the same conclusions independently, as it offers some credibility to both.
Can someone who knows Numerical Python clue in those of us not familiar? Is this akin to Perl's PDL? Just curious. It's the first time I've come across the term.
In Perl, PDL is a wonderful tool, but it relies on some of those ancient fortran libraries that everyone (in the scientific community, anyway) has been dragging around since the dawn of time, and getting it to compile and install can be a bear.
If Numerical Python does essentially the same thing, and is slightly easier to get up and running, I might toy around with it.
Oh for pity's sake let's not pretend that these are words that are anything but slang-gone-mainstream. geek and nerd are used interchangably. Heck, even dork (which refers to a psycology study of "latch key" or "door key" kids) is used interchangably with the above two. If you're looking for a language that is less dynamic than the dialect of English written on the Web, please feel free to resort to Church Latin.
The mere fact that some dictionary has deigned to list a word does not negate its custom of colloquial use (which, yes, often trumps archaic usages like using "geek" to refer to circus performers).
This is a US site. When you mention your country collectively rather than directly, I am left to assume you are talking about the US by default.
Don't be pointlessly pedandtic. Obviously if the original poster meant The Duchy of Grand Fenwick, then he should have said so.
I'd assume they're like ours; live there for so many years and you become a naturalized citizen.
I know a few legal aliens who would love to know when you found that loop-hole! Citizenship in the US is much harder to attain than that.
If you're unfamiliar with MC Chris, then I kindly ask that you place your nerd membership in this waste receptacle for immediate processing.
With pride.
You can't buy such an honor because it's impossible to attain (at least for Bill). I'm not sure if naturalized citizens of GB can be called "Sir", but you can't be knighted at all if you're an American (or any other nationality) like Bill. As the article stated, you can be given an honorary title, but it's not the same thing at all. It pretty much just means that you've been honored by the crown.
I suggest that unless you know the OP, you stick to what they DID say:
This is a clear statement: they must do X (encourage active development) if they want Y (to catch up to the momentum of Linux). You can argue with the specifics, if you disagree, but please don't start bringing phrases like "to be considered truly open-source" into it as if that were what the OP was talking about.
"We don't measure HDs in Terabits . 1 Tbit = 128 GBytes or 128 gigs3"
YOU may not, but I assure you that those doing research into hard-drive platter manufacture do. What's more, this isn't a hard-drive platter, it's a random-access device, which are ALWAYS measured in bits, not bytes (except when labeling a product for the masses).
This is not a product, ready to ship, it's a prototype, and as such you're being exposed to the technical terminology of the industry that produces these devices, NOT the technical terminology of the industry that consumes them.
Please carry on.
While not truly an algorithmic optimization, the old Apollo compilers got in some hot water with benchmarkers by recognizing when input code was identical to certain library functions, and substituting a call to the library code. One benchmark ran something like 100 times faster on Apollos than it did on Suns. Persoanlly, I thought it was valid, since it was a generic optimization that would have helped real user code (I think they were specifically replacing FFTs with a hand-tuned assembly version).
First off, someone please mod up the parent. Good reply, and I bow to obvious facts that contradict my statement.
However, your point about hubble is mis-placed. Hubble can't resolve this kind of image any better than ground-based AO scopes at this point (not because the atmosphere poses no obsticle, but because AO allows better than default resolution, and technology has advanced since Hubble was sent up).
As others have pointed out to me here on Slashdot, the reason that Hubble is useful is that certain wavelengths simply don't get through our atmosphere, so while pictures like the one you link to could be taken from the ground today, a great deal of research cannot.
Personally, I'd love to see a ground-based scope on the far side of the moon to replace hubble, but I'm probably just dreaming.
"Eleven(it's becoming a game now) people take Slashdot seriously enough to put me on their Foes list."
Well, I don't take Slashdot seriously at all, so I put you on my foes list for fun. Have a nice day!
If the plane of the galaxy is exactly perpendicular to our line of sight, then you would observe no shift in a perfectly circular galaxy (I believe that most are eliptical, however).
For a circular galaxy, given the amount of shift that can be detected using modern equipment, you should be able to trivially construct the probability that any galaxy at a given distance would fall within the tolerance required. I suspect that it's a very small probability (on the order of so small we've probably never measured one such).
Either way, if you DO see spin, then it's not an issue.
There are a few mistakes in your conjectures. First off, we're not talking about "a star". You would most likely not be able to make out a single star in such a remote galaxy unless it were astoundingly bright.
;-)
What this tells us is that the density of visible stars in that galaxy (assuming a normal distribution of magnitudes) is low enough that we cannot detect any of them. Someone else care to do the math and tell us what that density threshold is?
When you see "stars" in distant galaxies like Andromeda, what you're really seeing are clusters of stars, though perhaps modern technology has allowed us to resolve single very bright stars, I'm not sure.
As for something blocking our view... that's unlikely, as the dark galaxy was detected by viewing its hydrogen signature in radio wavelengths, so there's no problem seeing it in the correct wavelength.
Most likely (my untrained opinion), this is a galaxy composed of either very small stars or very old (burned out) stars. I'm sure there are good models for describing either. In the first case, for example, I would think that a low initial density of stellar material (mostly hydrogen) would lead to the formation of smaller-than-average stars.
What I think this observation proves is that galactic magnitudes can dip below our viewing threshold in the visible spectrum, and therefore any estimates of the mass of the universe based on visual surveys can be discounted. This makes the closed theory of universal expansion far more likely (e.g. that the universe will expand to a certain point, and then begin to contract until it collapses back into a singularity from which a new Big Bang would arise).
Ok, real astronomers ready your red ink!
It's not illegal. At least not by default.
Where it becomes a problem is when you attempt to steal customers in this way. For example, you would be well within your right to put up a site called slashdot.info and have as the main page, "[ad] [ad] [ad] Sorry, you typed slashdot.info [ad] and you probably meant [ad] to type slashdot.org [ad] [ad] [ad]".
You are providing a (questionably useful) service ad deriving advertising from it. Trademark law allows for this. When, on the other hand, you put up a site that looks exactly like Slashdot.org with your own ad revenue, but is at slashdot.info, then Slashdot would have every right to sue.
Honestly, I'm at a loss to understand the anger here. Even if you don't tell the poor sap where to go, this just seems like a silly thing to get upset about. It's not at all a zero-sum game, so relax and take a deep breath.
There's no need to do that, and it presents an opportunity for abuse (gives you a chance of defauding the vendor, though a small one).
This is "authorization", not "payment". The vendor will still submit a normal credit card transaction with the amount, and if the authroization does not match the amount, then the normal exception handling processes involved in insufficient funds transpire. None of that has to be new technology, and there's no reason to throw out working code.
The point is that without users having to communicate with banks directly, a simple browser plugin could make all online transactions totally secure, even in the face of a vendor who is out to cheat the customer. The vendor can still cheat after-the-fact (e.g. not send the goods), but the transaction itself is assured in so far as our cryptographic protocols are.
We just choose not to do this.
You could do it either way, but the vendor is going to get confirmation of the transaction from the bank. If the bank comes back and says, ok, self told me to give you $2, then vendor is going to report that you had insufficient funds and fail the transaction.
The reason to hide the information you're sending to the bank is that you might include other details in that request that the vendor should not see. If not, then it does not matter which path you choose.
Well, that's a full-body shot, but a much worse picture.
Overall, these are very impressive shots, and I have to say, I'm looking forward to this. None of what I hoped for is in it (in terms of really turning the plot back on itself and getting creative), but it looks like a lot of fun, and a good cap to what I think was a fairly slow-to-build initial pair of movies (no, I didn't hate them, and I do think that they were at least as good as Jedi... teen romance and cute aliens are just guaranteed to turn off most SF fans no matter what else you have to offer).
It still sounds like a silly law.
It's essentially saying that the ISP must provide a crime-reporting service for the police. What if I report child porn to my local real estate agent? Why aren't THEY required to provide this service as well?
Crimes should be reported to the police, not ISPs. If an ISP is made aware of a crime, and they feel the report has merit, they should notify the police, but I don't see a reason to specifically call out one crime and require that all reports must be forwarded to the police.
Worst case scenario, this law is highly vulnerable to denial of service attacks (I pity the ISP that someone decides to taunt in this way, and NO THIS IS NOT A SUGGESTION... PLEASE DON'T DO THAT).