Really, no clear link? Did they even ask one player? These are both low-hanging fruit for the solo completionist.
This is also why the "automated suggestions" they propose would be laughable.
"We noticed your mage spent countless hours walking to every corner of the world, to get a badge that no-one is impressed by and which does not impact gameplay. Perhaps you would enjoy spending countless hours looking for low-level mobs to punch?"
Not to go into grumpy-old-man mode, but by 1995 the distributions were pretty damn easy to use. At least, for the types of people who would have been interested in using Linux.
My roommate and I, both comp-sci students, built our first box in early 1992. This was before the advent of "distros". Just getting the sources was hard... we started out trying to them off a local BBS using our trusty 14.4k. Eventually we gave up and used sneaker-net by burning floppies at our Uni's lab and carrying them home. It was around a mile away, which made it pretty annoying when a disk would end up being corrupt.
The actual install had to be bootstrapped from DOS, using a mish-mash of tools. And once you finally got the thing booted into "Linux", it was a sad little bare-bones system. More sneaker-net downloads ensued as we pieced together gcc, a decent set of libs, SLIP support, and eventually X-Windows. We had to fix several user-space bugs as we went (thank goodness we had all the code)... the most annoying one being in the utilities we were using to automated the slip handshake. Keep in mind that all of the instructions were buried in READMEs and a few FAQs we had printed off of Usenet.
And you know what... it was completely worth it. At the time, it was amazing to think that you could have your OWN PERSONAL UNIX WORKSTATION, with all the GNU tools. It saved us so much time because we were able to work on projects and assignments locally, without hiking to the lab or being constrained by an 80x24 terminal over a 14.4k modem. And the resulting code had a decent chance of compiling with no tweaks on the SunOS and HPUX boxes we used for class.
When SLS came out (the first distro I'd heard of), it was a godsend and we never looked back. By 1995, the distros were getting mature, though they still expected that you knew some of the underlying details.
1.Do something like what they did in the second world and escort civilian ships through the (relatively small) danger zone.
It's not a "relatively small" zone. Somali pirates are operating over 1,000 miles from their shore.
Any pirates that show up get to find out just what the massive deck gun or missile launcher of a navy destroyer does to a small pirate boat.
The Navy can't go around shooting up boats because they look "piratey". And only the stupidiest pirates run up to a destroyer and try to attack it (it has happened though).
2.Apply international pressure on the government of Somalia to clean up its act and clear things out. Offer them incentives (foriegn aid, support to eliminate the warlords and guns or whatever else) if they are willing to clean up their country and stop the pirates.
Somalia is the definition of a Failed state. Their "government" doesn't have any control over the areas the pirates call home. It's not like they can just send the police in to "clear things out". It would be an invasion, which the government would probably lose.
Find things the Somali fishermen-turned-pirates can use to earn a legitimate living. If they have enough money to live off without piracy, they are much less likely to take the risk (especially given #1 above).
These people arent terrorists, they have no political agenda, they are only in it because they feel like they have no other choice if they want to survive.
Let's not romanticize this. The idea that these are fishermen-turned-pirates just trying to defend their home waters and/or provide for their families is ridiculous. These are organized crime rings who are willing to steal, kidnap and murder for a chance to strike it rich.
The truth is the only likely way to solve the problem is for interational forces to invade and occupy the coast. But the world already tried the "peacekeeping" approach there in the 90's, and I don't think anyone has the stomach to repeat the experience.
The article you cited is very good... they actually researched to find out what was really happening.
But you should point out that the author ends up agreeing with Comcast's strategy.
Comcast doesn't block you from using BitTorrent, it simply limits the number of simultaneous uploads you can perform at once.
...this is content- and viewpoint-neutral and it isn't "content-based discrimination" as so many make it out to be.
It concludes...
If the Net Neutrality extremists get their way and get the Government to ban active network management, cable broadband customers will suffer and those web hog TV commercials might just come true.
This isn't about competition... it's just a fun way to engage the public with a little history, and promote the museum on the side.
From the article:
"Witnessing Colossus Mark II in action is a chance to relive and admire the historic breakthrough made by Bletchley Park code breakers during World War II."
Given that Slashdotters aren't usually discussing and researching the Colossus project, I'd say they did a good job.:)
The OLPC team should be ecstatic, if I understand their mission correctly.
Ask yourself... which of the following is most likely to deliver accessible computing to the world's children?
A non-profit organization, wielding a monopoly on a niche market.
Multiple vendors, driven by market forces to produce a device more innovative and affordable than the competitions'.
The OLPC's ideas are interesting, but also unorthodox: Mesh Networking, XO LCDs, "View Source" buttons, etc. Combine them together, and you get a product that frankly looks a bit like a hacker's research project. Unless they're certain that this approach is the perfect way to serve underpriveleged children, they should welcome Intel's alternative take.
OLPC is a great idea, in the same way that Ansari X and Solar-Powere Racing are great ideas. You don't have to solve the problem all by yourself... instead prove the concept, inivite others to build on the work, and hope they come up with approaches that you didn't think of.
Re:Where are the innovations ?
on
Prey Review
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· Score: 1
I was one of the first internet gamers, playing in the first Australian national competition contested by 12 teams, each game played 4-8 a side. I then went on to be a part of the first Australian quake team playing Japan.
For the record, Quake wasn't released until 1996, which means you weren't even close to being one of the first Internet gamers.
By the time I went to university in 1990, games like netrek, mtrek and Bolo were in full swing. And even I know that I wasn't one of the first online gamers.
Sadly, there have been very few commercial games since that can match up well with Netrek. It offered 8v8 (or 16v16) online play and was an impressive blend of action and deep, coordinated, strategy. It usually took people a few years of continuous play before they were good enough to join an organized team. Unfortunately, it's hard to mass-market games with that kind of learning curve, which is probably why we don't see them anymore.
It's also interesting to note that the technology of those early games was quite sophisticated. This is probably because the online playerbase was made up of engineering students, who were the only ones with access to ethernet-connected workstations, and they refined the games over the course of years. The networking model of Netrek really wasn't matched by commercial games until the late 90's.
Oh well, enough reminiscing. Any PLATO/Empire players here to claim the title of "one of the first internet gamers?"
The county in question (Palm Beach) was won by Kerry. This seems to imply that any irregularities they found would not have changed the 2004 election.
BlackBoxVoting.org is run by Bev Harris who is a bit of a (my opinion) conspiracy nutjob. She's was banned from DemocraticUnderground.com, another pro-democrat voting rights site. Why? People on the forums "questioned her credibility" and she started threatening to sue the site and forum admins for libel.
Palm Beach country's election officials are democrats.
They don't report finding any particular party-bias in the "anomalies".
I'm a democrat and voted for Kerry, but I think the only people who see election fraud in the 2004 elections are people who really want to see it.
It seems to me that the "anomalies" that get reported are, by and large, statistical noise. It's nothing new... it's just that the results have received an unprecedented amount of scrutiny since the incredibly close 2000 election.
It's a good book, as is "A Deepness in the Sky" by the same author set in the same universe.
I know it's too late but, if you're interested in the book, try to avoid the 'review' above. It lays out FAR too much of the plot and background... a few quick statements above give away concepts that take over half the book to develop in an interesting way.
No offense intended to the original poster, who is obviously a big fan of the work.
If you study blackjack seriously, you'll quickly realize that the edge the counter has in the house is pretty miniscule. In a nice game, he might make an average of 3 cents on every dollar he bets. That requires optimal play.
Although counters do try to camoflauge their game, every minor deviation from the optimal strategy cuts into your winnings. It takes very little deviation before you're no longer playing winning blackjack.
For the curious, here's a link to one of my previous slashdot comments concerning the myths of blackjack: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=37970&cid=4071 386
I'll point out that the person who responded to my post to talk about "true counts" doesn't understand unbalanced systems which don't ask you to manually account for the amount of cards remaining to be played.
First of all, almost all digital SLR cameras share the 3:2 format with film. The all-in-one cameras tend to use the 4:3 format. Regardless, I notice that you conveniently chose a 4x6 which is 3:2. But what about 8x10, 5x7 and other popular formats?
Lastly, the general concensus among photography experts is that the current crop of 6mp DSLRs meet or exceed the printability of fine grained color slide film.
The 1Ds basically destroys 35mm film and goes on to challenge medium format.
Here's a useful link: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/cameras/ 1ds/1ds-field.shtml
They're different cameras. A few (likely) advantages of the Sony: much smaller, much lighter, higher resolution (probably), 30fps VGA video, tilt-swivel body, live histogram, live preview, RGBE should provide superior color accuracy.
You would probably have to spend an additional $1.5k on lenses before you arrived at a system that was I would significantly prefer to shooting a Sony F series. Even then, you'd have to carry 2 or 3 heavy and awkward lenses to match the Sony's useful 20-200mm effective zoom.
What you really need to know about Card Counting
on
MIT vs. Las Vegas
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I've been a blackjack card counter since the late 1970's. I started out using the Revere APC system but switched in recent years to the excellent yet simple Knock-Out unbalanced count system.
This article, as with most Wired pieces these days, has a few grains of truth along with a lot of hype and dazzle. Here's a few points that should be made.
Fact #1: You don't have to be a math genius to count cards. Using the Knockout system, I just start with a count of zero and add 1 to my count every time I see a card with a value of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 or 7. I subtract 1 from my count every time I see a 10 or face card. The size of my bet changes as the count goes up. It's that simple.
Fact #2: You can't make money at Blackjack unless you already have money. The way the statistics work out, you need a bankroll of approximately 1000 times your minimum bet to have a reasonable assurance that a bad statistical swing doesn't wipe you out. That means about a $5000 bankroll just to sit down at a $5 minimum blackjack table. Playing at that level will net you approximately $17.50 per hour.
Fact #3: It's pretty boring. While everyone else is having fun, you're sitting there playing a game that is the gambling equivalent of working a factory job. It's repetitive and tedious; you get penalized cash every time you make a mistake. Most people find that they don't have the discipline to do this over the long haul.
Fact #4: It's the antithesis of glamorous. The people you meet who are really trying to make money from the casino industry are a pretty unsavory lot. The few who have the discipline, bankroll and skill to beat the casinos also realize that it's important to look just like another player. The professional card counter at a given table is probably the paunchy, middle-aged guy in the "I love Las Vegas" tourist T-shirt.
Fact #5: It's a dying art. In the 70's, the games were so good, that it took very little to get an edge. The casinos aren't run by mobsters anymore though, they're run by Harvard graduates who understand the games just as well as you do. The rules aren't as favorable, more decks are in play, and they're introducing "Universal Shufflers" that have the capacity to destroy the concept of card counting permanently. The casinos make their money from slots now; they don't have to offer a hyper-competitive blackjack game to lure in players.
Fact #6: If you have a large bankroll, the willingness to study, the discipline to stick to your game plan no matter what, you can make some money playing blackjack. If you have all of the above, however, I guarantee you that you can find a better way to make money.
All of that being said, blackjack isn't a bad hobby. Friends of mine like to gamble, and my business sometimes finds me in Vegas. Instead of handing my wallot over to the casino, I instead make some money, have some free drinks and meet interesting people. That's not so bad.
Well, this is a day late, so noone will read it, but...:)
Your reply doesn't respond to any points in particular. All it says is "We have a lot of software that already could be insecure, and I (as university network admin) have no control anyways. So, screw it and run SETI."
As I said in my post, and you seemed to ignore, you can have security risks from any software...it's a tradeoff of risk versus functionality.
From a corporate standpoint, the most sane viewpoint once you realize that is "We get no functionality from letting users run SETI on the machines and network that we paid for...we're not going to assume the risk". Just because you don't have that option in your position, doesn't mean that it's not the correct posture for the TVA.
It all comes down to employers simply not understanding what the application is for and using it as a scape goat for any problem that comes. It happens at my university.
It may seem odd to those who have never had to administrate a network, but the TVA happens to be absolutely correct.
It's not SETI software in particular that is a problem; it's having your users downloading random, useless software from the internet and running it on company (and likely priveleged) machines.
Every time that program starts running, it can do whatever it wants. It could be detecting aliens in the vicinity of Betelgeuse or it could be streaming your password file the SETI server so that it can pass it around for decryption. You can't tell; you didn't compile it...you don't even have the source. Even if you did, the admins don't have time to check the code just so you can have a pretty E.T. phonin' screensaver.
"But we trust SETI", you say. Why? You can't speak personally for the competence and/or ethics of the SETI programmers. If you could, you still wouldn't be able to tell if the binary had been modified after it left their hands. The program is also executing around arbitrary data downloaded from the internet...could it be made to misbehave with bad data from a man-in-the-middle? I dunno.
Maybe all of that seems unlikely, but this is the same policy that guards against the Marketing department's "Dog of the day" screensavers and Trojan Horse emails. As recently evidenced, it's true that you can have backdoors in production software, but at least there's a business return in exchange for the risk.
It's too easy to scoff at this as "employers not understanding" when you don't understand big picture.
Java runs on a platform that abstracts it from underlying concepts, much like any other application does.
Does your Mozilla.91 not work? Are you using glibc 2.2? Is Galeon slow...did you upgrade all the libraries it depends on?
Why did you recommend Perl as an alternative? Do you not realize that perl suffers from the exact same 'application environment' problems that Java does? The primary problem areas for Java portability are areas where Perl is hardly used. When was the last time you tried to get users to run your Perl/Tk program on Linux, Windows and MacOS X?
I'll mention that Perl is my preferred language. It's even the language that currently butters my bread. However, it is my observation that Java is significantly faster (after initialization...so I suppose it depends on how long the program is going to run), more scalable, and more appropriate for large systems.
Perl has advantages too...the most important, imho, is how quickly you can crank out code to do a particular job versus more structured languages.
That being said, I wouldn't recommend either C++ or Perl (your choices) as a language for primarily learning OOP concepts. Java, Python, Smalltalk and many others are more appropriate.
The first thing to avoid is using a programming course as a method of teaching hardware concepts. These are entirely different ideas and should be treated as such. The same argument you advance for C (forces you to deal with lower-level issues) can just as easily be used against C...make them program in assembler. I once could program reasonably well in 8088 assembler. Now, I realize that the exposure to the concepts was nice, but all the time I spent learning about 8088 specific architecture was useless.:)
A proper computer science curriculum should teach concepts, not necessarily 'trade skills'. For example, the university I went to taught the introductory classes in Modula-2; and once we were past learning 'how to program', they let us use the language of our choice for assignments.
Why Modula-2? Not because it was popular in the industry, it wasn't...and I haven't written a line in that language since my sophmore year. They used it because it was cleaner in many respects than C and Pascal (the other major alternatives) and provided strong constructs for functional, top-down programming (the methodology of choice at the time).
What people need to understand when they're initially learning to program are basic concepts: What's a flow-control construct? Why does abstraction make a program easier to maintain? What's the difference between strong vs late typing? You're not learning a language, you're learning a way of thinking.
I've developed in over a dozen languages since then...my current 'usable' stable is C/C++, Java, PHP and Perl. They're all strong in different areas, but when you really think about it...they're all pretty similar. When I pick up a new language, my question is just 'how do the following concepts that I need/use map to the new language'? Because I already know how to program and that's the hard part.
Now, to reply to the original question. Of my stable of languages, I would be most likely to recommend Java as a learning language. Why? Because it's a clean and simple language with less of the legacy baggage the others carry. It has a strong OOP support, which wasn't just tacked on at the end. The students won't waste as much time on the nuances of syntax when they could be learning how to design a good program.
My primary argument against Java would be that it's too object-oriented, making it more difficult to teach other programming methodologies.
Anyways, just remember, it's the concepts, not the language that matter.
What most slashdotters seem to not realize is that online gambling has been around for quite a while and is only becoming more common.
The big problem right now is that it's difficult for the common man to tell which of the online "casinos" are truly credible. Most of the casinos are in off-shore havens (Carribean, Central America), and there's no effective way to tell if you've been cheated. (Sorry sir, back luck on drawing that virtual 5 of spades!) On top of all of that, many people have reported problems getting payouts from certain organizations. If you lose, your credit card is debited. If you win, you may or may not see a check in three to four weeks.
The point of all of this is that Nevada gambling would at the least be regulated, accredited, and relatively trustworthy. There's so much money to be made from legal forms of gambling that none of the big players would risk their license over trying to cheat.
Is online gambling an evil? Maybe. But Nevada online gambling is a lesser evil.
One of my favorite books as a child was Robert Heinlein's 'The Moon is a Harsh Mistress' which talks about a lunar revolution dropping simple, massive rocks on earth targets...and that book is from the 60's at least.
I'm sure readers more well-read than myself can come up with much earlier examples.
If you don't like proprietary software, you should let the market know by using Free Software.
If you don't like proprietary music, you should go download and patronize the hordes of artists making their music available online for free.
GNU has nothing to do with figuring out ways to 'share' proprietary software without being caught. By using Windows and and listening to proprietary music, you're the one restricting your own freedom.
I genuinally don't understand the empathy shown to 'music sharers' from people who claim to be supporters of Free Software.
Music sharing is analogous to software piracy. It seems clear to me that musical artists, much like program authors, have the right to license their works however they see fit. You shouldn't say, "I don't like their license, so I'm going to steal their product. The correct action is to not listen to their music.
Richard Stallman didn't start a crusade to pirate proprietary operating systems; he simply said that he wouldn't use them. There are a lot of artists out there who are providing their music for free...patronize them.
I guess my question then is: how do the free/open source supporters who support music piracy reconcile this apparent ethical inconsistency.
Slashdot Mirror
Really, no clear link? Did they even ask one player? These are both low-hanging fruit for the solo completionist.
This is also why the "automated suggestions" they propose would be laughable.
"We noticed your mage spent countless hours walking to every corner of the world, to get a badge that no-one is impressed by and which does not impact gameplay. Perhaps you would enjoy spending countless hours looking for low-level mobs to punch?"
Location sharing in Android is already opt-in, with a per-app or per-website granularity.
Not to go into grumpy-old-man mode, but by 1995 the distributions were pretty damn easy to use. At least, for the types of people who would have been interested in using Linux.
My roommate and I, both comp-sci students, built our first box in early 1992. This was before the advent of "distros". Just getting the sources was hard... we started out trying to them off a local BBS using our trusty 14.4k. Eventually we gave up and used sneaker-net by burning floppies at our Uni's lab and carrying them home. It was around a mile away, which made it pretty annoying when a disk would end up being corrupt.
The actual install had to be bootstrapped from DOS, using a mish-mash of tools. And once you finally got the thing booted into "Linux", it was a sad little bare-bones system. More sneaker-net downloads ensued as we pieced together gcc, a decent set of libs, SLIP support, and eventually X-Windows. We had to fix several user-space bugs as we went (thank goodness we had all the code)... the most annoying one being in the utilities we were using to automated the slip handshake. Keep in mind that all of the instructions were buried in READMEs and a few FAQs we had printed off of Usenet.
And you know what... it was completely worth it. At the time, it was amazing to think that you could have your OWN PERSONAL UNIX WORKSTATION, with all the GNU tools. It saved us so much time because we were able to work on projects and assignments locally, without hiking to the lab or being constrained by an 80x24 terminal over a 14.4k modem. And the resulting code had a decent chance of compiling with no tweaks on the SunOS and HPUX boxes we used for class.
When SLS came out (the first distro I'd heard of), it was a godsend and we never looked back. By 1995, the distros were getting mature, though they still expected that you knew some of the underlying details.
1.Do something like what they did in the second world and escort civilian ships through the (relatively small) danger zone.
It's not a "relatively small" zone. Somali pirates are operating over 1,000 miles from their shore.
Any pirates that show up get to find out just what the massive deck gun or missile launcher of a navy destroyer does to a small pirate boat.
The Navy can't go around shooting up boats because they look "piratey". And only the stupidiest pirates run up to a destroyer and try to attack it (it has happened though).
2.Apply international pressure on the government of Somalia to clean up its act and clear things out. Offer them incentives (foriegn aid, support to eliminate the warlords and guns or whatever else) if they are willing to clean up their country and stop the pirates.
Somalia is the definition of a Failed state. Their "government" doesn't have any control over the areas the pirates call home. It's not like they can just send the police in to "clear things out". It would be an invasion, which the government would probably lose.
Find things the Somali fishermen-turned-pirates can use to earn a legitimate living. If they have enough money to live off without piracy, they are much less likely to take the risk (especially given #1 above).
These people arent terrorists, they have no political agenda, they are only in it because they feel like they have no other choice if they want to survive.
Let's not romanticize this. The idea that these are fishermen-turned-pirates just trying to defend their home waters and/or provide for their families is ridiculous. These are organized crime rings who are willing to steal, kidnap and murder for a chance to strike it rich.
The truth is the only likely way to solve the problem is for interational forces to invade and occupy the coast. But the world already tried the "peacekeeping" approach there in the 90's, and I don't think anyone has the stomach to repeat the experience.
But you should point out that the author ends up agreeing with Comcast's strategy.
It concludes...
s/Net Neutrality extremists/Slashdot Posters/g
This isn't about competition... it's just a fun way to engage the public with a little history, and promote the museum on the side.
From the article:
Given that Slashdotters aren't usually discussing and researching the Colossus project, I'd say they did a good job.
Ask yourself... which of the following is most likely to deliver accessible computing to the world's children?
The OLPC's ideas are interesting, but also unorthodox: Mesh Networking, XO LCDs, "View Source" buttons, etc. Combine them together, and you get a product that frankly looks a bit like a hacker's research project. Unless they're certain that this approach is the perfect way to serve underpriveleged children, they should welcome Intel's alternative take.
OLPC is a great idea, in the same way that Ansari X and Solar-Powere Racing are great ideas. You don't have to solve the problem all by yourself... instead prove the concept, inivite others to build on the work, and hope they come up with approaches that you didn't think of.
For the record, Quake wasn't released until 1996, which means you weren't even close to being one of the first Internet gamers.
By the time I went to university in 1990, games like netrek, mtrek and Bolo were in full swing. And even I know that I wasn't one of the first online gamers.
Sadly, there have been very few commercial games since that can match up well with Netrek. It offered 8v8 (or 16v16) online play and was an impressive blend of action and deep, coordinated, strategy. It usually took people a few years of continuous play before they were good enough to join an organized team. Unfortunately, it's hard to mass-market games with that kind of learning curve, which is probably why we don't see them anymore.
It's also interesting to note that the technology of those early games was quite sophisticated. This is probably because the online playerbase was made up of engineering students, who were the only ones with access to ethernet-connected workstations, and they refined the games over the course of years. The networking model of Netrek really wasn't matched by commercial games until the late 90's.
Oh well, enough reminiscing. Any PLATO/Empire players here to claim the title of "one of the first internet gamers?"
I'm a democrat and voted for Kerry, but I think the only people who see election fraud in the 2004 elections are people who really want to see it.
It seems to me that the "anomalies" that get reported are, by and large, statistical noise. It's nothing new... it's just that the results have received an unprecedented amount of scrutiny since the incredibly close 2000 election.
How did the parent get modded insightful?
:)
The maps are a copyrighted work. By default, you can't redistribute derivatives of that work unless the copyright holder explicitly grants permission.
The terms of service explain your rights to the content... they don't restrict them.
And yes... Fox can't dictate how you watch television. But try recording their lineup, stripping the commercials, and putting them on the Internet.
It's a good book, as is "A Deepness in the Sky" by the same author set in the same universe.
I know it's too late but, if you're interested in the book, try to avoid the 'review' above. It lays out FAR too much of the plot and background... a few quick statements above give away concepts that take over half the book to develop in an interesting way.
No offense intended to the original poster, who is obviously a big fan of the work.
If you study blackjack seriously, you'll quickly realize that the edge the counter has in the house is pretty miniscule. In a nice game, he might make an average of 3 cents on every dollar he bets. That requires optimal play.
Although counters do try to camoflauge their game, every minor deviation from the optimal strategy cuts into your winnings. It takes very little deviation before you're no longer playing winning blackjack.
For the curious, here's a link to one of my previous slashdot comments concerning the myths of blackjack: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=37970&cid=407
I'll point out that the person who responded to my post to talk about "true counts" doesn't understand unbalanced systems which don't ask you to manually account for the amount of cards remaining to be played.
Hrm...
First of all, almost all digital SLR cameras share the 3:2 format with film. The all-in-one cameras tend to use the 4:3 format. Regardless, I notice that you conveniently chose a 4x6 which is 3:2. But what about 8x10, 5x7 and other popular formats?
Lastly, the general concensus among photography experts is that the current crop of 6mp DSLRs meet or exceed the printability of fine grained color slide film.
The 1Ds basically destroys 35mm film and goes on to challenge medium format.
Here's a useful link: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/cameras
They're different cameras. A few (likely) advantages of the Sony: much smaller, much lighter, higher resolution (probably), 30fps VGA video, tilt-swivel body, live histogram, live preview, RGBE should provide superior color accuracy.
You would probably have to spend an additional $1.5k on lenses before you arrived at a system that was I would significantly prefer to shooting a Sony F series. Even then, you'd have to carry 2 or 3 heavy and awkward lenses to match the Sony's useful 20-200mm effective zoom.
I've been a blackjack card counter since the late 1970's. I started out using the Revere APC system but switched in recent years to the excellent yet simple Knock-Out unbalanced count system.
:)
This article, as with most Wired pieces these days, has a few grains of truth along with a lot of hype and dazzle. Here's a few points that should be made.
Fact #1: You don't have to be a math genius to count cards. Using the Knockout system, I just start with a count of zero and add 1 to my count every time I see a card with a value of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 or 7. I subtract 1 from my count every time I see a 10 or face card. The size of my bet changes as the count goes up. It's that simple.
Fact #2: You can't make money at Blackjack unless you already have money. The way the statistics work out, you need a bankroll of approximately 1000 times your minimum bet to have a reasonable assurance that a bad statistical swing doesn't wipe you out. That means about a $5000 bankroll just to sit down at a $5 minimum blackjack table. Playing at that level will net you approximately $17.50 per hour.
Fact #3: It's pretty boring. While everyone else is having fun, you're sitting there playing a game that is the gambling equivalent of working a factory job. It's repetitive and tedious; you get penalized cash every time you make a mistake. Most people find that they don't have the discipline to do this over the long haul.
Fact #4: It's the antithesis of glamorous. The people you meet who are really trying to make money from the casino industry are a pretty unsavory lot. The few who have the discipline, bankroll and skill to beat the casinos also realize that it's important to look just like another player. The professional card counter at a given table is probably the paunchy, middle-aged guy in the "I love Las Vegas" tourist T-shirt.
Fact #5: It's a dying art. In the 70's, the games were so good, that it took very little to get an edge. The casinos aren't run by mobsters anymore though, they're run by Harvard graduates who understand the games just as well as you do. The rules aren't as favorable, more decks are in play, and they're introducing "Universal Shufflers" that have the capacity to destroy the concept of card counting permanently. The casinos make their money from slots now; they don't have to offer a hyper-competitive blackjack game to lure in players.
Fact #6: If you have a large bankroll, the willingness to study, the discipline to stick to your game plan no matter what, you can make some money playing blackjack. If you have all of the above, however, I guarantee you that you can find a better way to make money.
All of that being said, blackjack isn't a bad hobby. Friends of mine like to gamble, and my business sometimes finds me in Vegas. Instead of handing my wallot over to the casino, I instead make some money, have some free drinks and meet interesting people. That's not so bad.
Just don't listen to too much hype from Wired.
...to use Postgresql. As if subselects weren't
enough.
Well, this is a day late, so noone will read it, but... :)
Your reply doesn't respond to any points in particular. All it says is "We have a lot of software that already could be insecure, and I (as university network admin) have no control anyways. So, screw it and run SETI."
As I said in my post, and you seemed to ignore, you can have security risks from any software...it's a tradeoff of risk versus functionality.
From a corporate standpoint, the most sane viewpoint once you realize that is "We get no functionality from letting users run SETI on the machines and network that we paid for...we're not going to assume the risk". Just because you don't have that option in your position, doesn't mean that it's not the correct posture for the TVA.
It may seem odd to those who have never had to administrate a network, but the TVA happens to be absolutely correct.
It's not SETI software in particular that is a problem; it's having your users downloading random, useless software from the internet and running it on company (and likely priveleged) machines.
Every time that program starts running, it can do whatever it wants. It could be detecting aliens in the vicinity of Betelgeuse or it could be streaming your password file the SETI server so that it can pass it around for decryption. You can't tell; you didn't compile it...you don't even have the source. Even if you did, the admins don't have time to check the code just so you can have a pretty E.T. phonin' screensaver.
"But we trust SETI", you say. Why? You can't speak personally for the competence and/or ethics of the SETI programmers. If you could, you still wouldn't be able to tell if the binary had been modified after it left their hands. The program is also executing around arbitrary data downloaded from the internet...could it be made to misbehave with bad data from a man-in-the-middle? I dunno.
Maybe all of that seems unlikely, but this is the same policy that guards against the Marketing department's "Dog of the day" screensavers and Trojan Horse emails. As recently evidenced, it's true that you can have backdoors in production software, but at least there's a business return in exchange for the risk.
It's too easy to scoff at this as "employers not understanding" when you don't understand big picture.
Java runs on a platform that abstracts it from underlying concepts, much like any other application does.
.91 not work? Are you using glibc 2.2? Is Galeon slow...did you upgrade all the libraries it depends on?
Does your Mozilla
Why did you recommend Perl as an alternative? Do you not realize that perl suffers from the exact same 'application environment' problems that Java does? The primary problem areas for Java portability are areas where Perl is hardly used. When was the last time you tried to get users to run your Perl/Tk program on Linux, Windows and MacOS X?
I'll mention that Perl is my preferred language. It's even the language that currently butters my bread. However, it is my observation that Java is significantly faster (after initialization...so I suppose it depends on how long the program is going to run), more scalable, and more appropriate for large systems.
Perl has advantages too...the most important, imho, is how quickly you can crank out code to do a particular job versus more structured languages.
That being said, I wouldn't recommend either C++ or Perl (your choices) as a language for primarily learning OOP concepts. Java, Python, Smalltalk and many others are more appropriate.
The first thing to avoid is using a programming course as a method of teaching hardware concepts. These are entirely different ideas and should be treated as such. The same argument you advance for C (forces you to deal with lower-level issues) can just as easily be used against C...make them program in assembler. I once could program reasonably well in 8088 assembler. Now, I realize that the exposure to the concepts was nice, but all the time I spent learning about 8088 specific architecture was useless.
A proper computer science curriculum should teach concepts, not necessarily 'trade skills'. For example, the university I went to taught the introductory classes in Modula-2; and once we were past learning 'how to program', they let us use the language of our choice for assignments.
Why Modula-2? Not because it was popular in the industry, it wasn't...and I haven't written a line in that language since my sophmore year. They used it because it was cleaner in many respects than C and Pascal (the other major alternatives) and provided strong constructs for functional, top-down programming (the methodology of choice at the time).
What people need to understand when they're initially learning to program are basic concepts: What's a flow-control construct? Why does abstraction make a program easier to maintain? What's the difference between strong vs late typing? You're not learning a language, you're learning a way of thinking.
I've developed in over a dozen languages since then...my current 'usable' stable is C/C++, Java, PHP and Perl. They're all strong in different areas, but when you really think about it...they're all pretty similar. When I pick up a new language, my question is just 'how do the following concepts that I need/use map to the new language'? Because I already know how to program and that's the hard part.
Now, to reply to the original question. Of my stable of languages, I would be most likely to recommend Java as a learning language. Why? Because it's a clean and simple language with less of the legacy baggage the others carry. It has a strong OOP support, which wasn't just tacked on at the end. The students won't waste as much time on the nuances of syntax when they could be learning how to design a good program.
My primary argument against Java would be that it's too object-oriented, making it more difficult to teach other programming methodologies.
Anyways, just remember, it's the concepts, not the language that matter.
What most slashdotters seem to not realize is that online gambling has been around for quite a while and is only becoming more common.
The big problem right now is that it's difficult for the common man to tell which of the online "casinos" are truly credible. Most of the casinos are in off-shore havens (Carribean, Central America), and there's no effective way to tell if you've been cheated. (Sorry sir, back luck on drawing that virtual 5 of spades!) On top of all of that, many people have reported problems getting payouts from certain organizations. If you lose, your credit card is debited. If you win, you may or may not see a check in three to four weeks.
The point of all of this is that Nevada gambling would at the least be regulated, accredited, and relatively trustworthy. There's so much money to be made from legal forms of gambling that none of the big players would risk their license over trying to cheat.
Is online gambling an evil? Maybe. But Nevada online gambling is a lesser evil.
Babylon 5? Puh-leeze.
One of my favorite books as a child was Robert Heinlein's 'The Moon is a Harsh Mistress' which talks about a lunar revolution dropping simple, massive rocks on earth targets...and that book is from the 60's at least.
I'm sure readers more well-read than myself can come up with much earlier examples.
You're missing the point entirely.
If you don't like proprietary software, you should let the market know by using Free Software.
If you don't like proprietary music, you should go download and patronize the hordes of artists making their music available online for free.
GNU has nothing to do with figuring out ways to 'share' proprietary software without being caught. By using Windows and and listening to proprietary music, you're the one restricting your own freedom.
I genuinally don't understand the empathy shown to 'music sharers' from people who claim to be supporters of Free Software.
Music sharing is analogous to software piracy. It seems clear to me that musical artists, much like program authors, have the right to license their works however they see fit. You shouldn't say, "I don't like their license, so I'm going to steal their product. The correct action is to not listen to their music.
Richard Stallman didn't start a crusade to pirate proprietary operating systems; he simply said that he wouldn't use them. There are a lot of artists out there who are providing their music for free...patronize them.
I guess my question then is: how do the free/open source supporters who support music piracy reconcile this apparent ethical inconsistency.