The CD will play in PCs that meet the following minimum system requirements: PC with at least Pentium® 133mHz or compatible processor, 32 MB RAM, CD-ROM drive, soundcard and speakers, Microsoft ®Windows95®, Windows98®, Windows2000®, Windows ME®, Windows XP® or Windows NT 4 ® with Service Pack 4.
If my "PC" doesn't have Windows, it hasn't met the "minimum system requirements" to play a CD.
Simply go here, and check to see if your favorite pyramid-scheme spammer is on there. Most of them are.
Now, go and sign up one of them for random free crap (AOL CD's, etc.). If one lives near you, taking out frustrations on them next halloween will be even more effective.
Of course, I'm not advocating you do anything illegal. But, when they give away their addresses, they must be seeking feedback about their social skills.
There's a fine line between an addiction and a hobby. Gaming generally is on the "addiction" side, but if approached correctly, can be found on the other side of the street.
Of course, classic gaming has been stigmatized, and those who practice such often find themselves in the warez camps. But the intention is pure. Finding a hack to get that old commodore game to run on your AIX box with sound is a modest accomplishment. Also, browsing garage sales and auctions in search of archaic hardware now could be your own personal goldmine 50 years from now, when such stuff is harder to find. Surely being an expert in such matters is admirable.
And, many games teach you about life. For me, it's roller-coaster tycoon. Others are brought in by the extremely popular civ set. Making quick decisions and taking calculated risks are skills that are marketable in today's type of work force.
Lastly, there's those people who using gaming to become better at there career. Race-car drivers, Air Force pilots, and the like have more training resources available to them because of the gaming industry. Those of us unlucky enough to not have such careers, can become more well-rounded by using these games to learn.
Of course, you can find just as many negatives as positives. I'll leave that argument to someone else. I've got to finish my work so I can go home and play my playstation 2.
I always lean towards less government interaction as any good Republican or Libertarian would do. So of course, the only stuff congress should do is make suggestions.
You know how the chemical industry uses a diamond to warn users of the risks of a substance right? How about doing the same for software? Here's the 4 areas I'd like to see:
1. Possibility of hidden holes vs. freely-available source:
Any software that's not open source will die on this one. How can your software be secure if there may be backdoors?
2. Establishment:
Any software that's been around since the sixties is going to be tested more than something written last year. Also, its easier to find help on newsgroups/webboards for established software.
3. Customization:
Most programs can be customized through a GUI interface, through the editing of a text file, or both. Traditionally, text files allow the most customization, but a killer GUI could also score well on this point. Also, software that is not released under a GPL-like agreement cannot be strengthened by an administrator. This sub-point could be probably be broken off into a new area.
4. Platform independance:
If the administration should change from one OS to another, its desirable to keep the same software. Flexibility in this regard equals safety. New-hire administrators are more likely to be knowledgable about software available for any platform. Also OS vendors who build security software for their own OS only are more likely to be concentrating on profitability over security.
Of course, these standards may be tough for some software vendors to acheive (no names here!). But that doesn't make them unimportant.
If we would have had these standards a long time ago, I don't think we'd be in the mess we are today.
A way to delete the contents of the URL bar without destroying the contents of my clipboard. Right now, I copy a URL from somewhere else, then click in the URL bar and hit delete, just to have the contents of the URL bar copied to my clipboard.
put your cursor at the beginning of the line, and then press cntrl-d.
For some reason, this works for Mozilla/Solaris, but not for Mozilla/linux. Can someone tell me why?
All of these distributed projects reach into medical research and are as such a bit more useful than searching for ET [berkeley.edu] or cracking RC-5 [distributed.net].
Amen brother! Let's go to battle. I'll stack up our 4 prime number discoveries against anything you SETI people have found anyday!
No apologies here! I'm all for starting a flame war. May the most productive way to waste time win... and all that crap!
There are lots of reasons for joining primenet. Finding ET life is not one. It's more about discovering the beauties of mathematics than anything else.
As one whose been on this project for nearly two years, and has contributed 11.197 years of computational time into it, I feel as if I'm a large part of the project. In fact, there are only 1500 accounts higher than mine in the ranking.
If I was looking for the best way to reach E.T., I would have joined SETI. Saying that our goal is to find E.T. just because SETI is so popular is a big insult. I'm sure 1480 of the 1500 people ahead of me would agree.
It's pretty easy. Believe it or not, the method to check whether they are primes or not involves FFT's. This means that integers are turned to floats to make use of the newest instructions available to processors today. Then, they are turned back to ints at the end of each iteration. Some checking is done to verify that nothing was lost in the rounding.
If something is lost in the rounding, the next person who does the check will find it. When they start the first iteration, a random seed is picked. At the end, the seed is "subtracted" from the residue. The residue will exactly match the residue from the first person who ran the primality test.
The float-to-int rounding error would cause the two testers to have entirely different residues. Also, there is no way to create the residue except to run the full primality test.
Of course, I should be referring you to the official FAQ's. But they're crappy.
If you want a good faq about the math of the system, read the mailing list FAQ's. These are much more interesting.
Peninsula Hospital Centre in Rockaway say 15 people are currently being treated for injuries from the Queens jet crash.
A hospital spokesman said none are thought to be serious.
He stressed it is too early to get a complete picture of the extent of the injuries.
Meanwhile, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw is in New York to attend a UN General Assembly meeting.
He said: "Like everyone in New York, I was profoundly shocked when I heard the news that an American Airlines plane had come down shortly after taking off from JFK airport.
"Our first thoughts are for those who have perished and their loved ones who have to bear the news, but our hearts must also go out to all New Yorkers for whom - whatever the cause - this further disaster will have reopened the wounds of September 11."
The ACLU protects civil liberties in name only.
There's been quite a few cases already where they have been against allowing kids to pray in schools (which kind of seems like a civil liberty to me!)
I don't care what you think about school prayer. Get rid of your preconceptions, and think about it. Should a group with the name "American Civil Liberties Union" be for or against allowing children to worship as they wish?
But there is something about the way the community works to support itself which is brilliant, and which we've done many good things, but we think we've seen some good things sort of in the Linux, et cetera, world, and I encourage you to go up to Microsoft.com and check out our community areas.
And, of course, the quote's not complete. I snipped a bunch too.
But this is what stood out to me. Bill Gates himself has now called slashdot "brilliant"! He could, of course, be talking about newsgroups. If you've spent much time there, you know the linux groups are much more friendly than the groups full of MS apologists. The truth is that people who write software, and give it away for free are friendly!
Once I was working on writing a driver for a network card on microcontroller hardware. I wrote to Alan Cox, to ask for help. My work had nothing to do with GNU or linux, but guess what.... He responded, and told me exactly what I needed to know! I doubt Ballmer would do that!
MS may try to copy our developer model, but it will never work. People in a corporate atmosphere cannot harness the full power of cooperation, because it's not in their nature.
These pants were purchased with a license for one user only. XP has detected that more than 3 pieces of hardware have been changed, which indicates they are being worn by someone not named in the signed agreement.
C. Microsoft shall not restrict by agreement any OEM licensee from exercising any of the following options or alternatives:
Offering users the option of launching other Operating Systems from the Basic Input/Output System or a non-Microsoft boot-loader or similar program that launches prior to the start of the Windows Operating System Product.
Presenting in the initial boot sequence its own IAP offer provided that the OEM complies with reasonable technical specifications established by Microsoft, including a requirement that the end user be returned to the initial boot sequence upon the conclusion of any such offer.
Then explain like the other poster here did - what a transistor is, how it works, and how design methods are better in base 3 versus base 2. To call someone not an engineer because he thinks that base 3 is inefficient is idiotic. Maybe you'll blame him for hating base 1.5 as well?
K-maps can be used in base 3 for evaluating base-3 logic expressions just as easily as it can for base-2 logic expressions. Simply look for m-by-n rectangles filled with 1's, or 2's, or 0's. Soon, you'll find that you'll need a few more gates for your average 4-input expression, but your average 4-input expression will be much more powerful.
The poster never even considered all the implications of a base-3 k-map. Sure, it's hard to do in a short slashdot post. But, there are advantages to be found. "It's too complicated" is a cheap excuse, and has held up progress many times.
Adding up the pros and cons of an idea can be tricky. We already know there are plenty of "pros" for such a system. (lookups and insertions into a trinary tree can be faster than in a binary tree). We've started to evaluate the "cons" but it's still way to early to know which will win.
Cynicism has its time and place. It's very good to have when considering bringing a product to market or not. But, that's not where we are. The author had no intention of convincing anyone to throw their binary computers out the window. It's merely an idea that has not been studied much. A couple of computers were built in the '60s, and nothing more.
Doing things with 3's instead of 2's will be complicated, and and may take more research. I'd give up!
What an attitude! I find it hard to believe you'll ever get hired as an engineer. Making stuff like this work is the dream of a good engineer. Your desire to explore needs to be greater than your desire to be comfortable.
A lot of these challenges have already been solved. Some of them were solved 100 years ago (read the article). Many of your examples are things that may seem complicated to us using 3-way logic, but may actually be more efficient once we fully understand the properties.
Code, java calculator, and other fun stuff
on
Ternary Computing
·
· Score: 1
I know a few people are going to call me a linux zealot for this, and I'll be modded down, but discovering a "whole new world" like this happens all the time when people discover Unix.
Me? I'm started off as an EE. Hardware guy. I couldn't make heads or tails out of software. I hated working with computers (win3.1 and win95) and thought that any job with them would suck.
Fall '97, I transfered to U of I (that's Illinois, not Iowa). Found out that to read my email, I had to log into a system that ran Unix (which I thought had died out somewhere around 1975). Soon, I had it mastered. I became 1337 when I took shell scripts to finger all your friends rewrote them in perl to print out neat little tables in color (using VT100 codes).
It was just the beginning. Soon, I got a job teaching new students how to use Unix. I borrowed a couple RedHat 5.2 disks from a TA, and installed them (what I consider to be the largest upgrade I've ever made). I learned vi (learned some emacs too, but am not proud of it). And I'm a changed man.
I finished out my EE classes, but went and got a minor in CS. Now, I work at [bleep] using my perl/C/shell skills and am busy forgetting about CMOS and opamps and the like.
Life is fun. I hope these chaps coming from the prisons find it as enjoyable as me.
The system promises fewer computer crashes and will allow users to delete data from their hard drive.
Allows me to delete data? How generous.
Seriously, though, what the hell is this supposed to mean?
I think it's a misprint. I think that one of the biggest features of XP is that you can't delete certain stuff on you're drive. Of course, wording it such a way would be bad PR
The problem has been JoeShmoeProgrammerPro who writes driver installation scripts that remove dll's from the user's machines. XP will make sees a request to remove twain32.dll, and quickly makes a backup copy. Joe's script replaces twain32.dll with you-know-what, and XP doesn't complain. Then, when Joe's script is done, XP copies the original twain32.dll back.
Is it good, or is it bad? Obviously, it's bad because it doesn't tell the user anything about what happened. But, similair stuff in MillE has worked, and, generally, people like it.
The following is clipped from an American History website:
Grenville was preparing a new tax because revenues were still too low. Instead of offering it to Parliament right away he made the colonies a proposal. He gave them the chance to raise money themselves, in other words, to tax themselves. It is not entirely clear why Grenville did this as some say he was planning to introduce a new tax anyway. Probably he tried to give the colonies a feeling of having some degree of control in their own affairs in an attempt to bypass American opposition. The fact Grenville did not mention the exact amount of money he wanted, left the Assemblies in the American colonies in a state of confusion and suggests indeed the proposal was merely a strategic move. Colonial agents defending their cause were not heard by Parliament during the time the Act was scheduled to be discussed, another fact which added to the already tense atmosphere. Parliament accepted the Stamp Act in January 1765. It called for a tax on all kinds of paper in use, like various kinds of official documents used in court, harbors, land transactions, et cetera. The Act prescribed these documents had to be printed on paper carrying an official stamp.
Maybe I'm going insane. I can't believe we have such inept people in congress.
Slashdot Mirror
If my "PC" doesn't have Windows, it hasn't met the "minimum system requirements" to play a CD.
It must be time to "upgrade"!
I did solve it.
The only reason I haven't posted it is because I can't seem to get it past the lameness filters!
Isn't it ironic?
Simply go here, and check to see if your favorite pyramid-scheme spammer is on there. Most of them are.
Now, go and sign up one of them for random free crap (AOL CD's, etc.). If one lives near you, taking out frustrations on them next halloween will be even more effective.
Of course, I'm not advocating you do anything illegal. But, when they give away their addresses, they must be seeking feedback about their social skills.
There's a fine line between an addiction and a hobby. Gaming generally is on the "addiction" side, but if approached correctly, can be found on the other side of the street.
Of course, classic gaming has been stigmatized, and those who practice such often find themselves in the warez camps. But the intention is pure. Finding a hack to get that old commodore game to run on your AIX box with sound is a modest accomplishment. Also, browsing garage sales and auctions in search of archaic hardware now could be your own personal goldmine 50 years from now, when such stuff is harder to find. Surely being an expert in such matters is admirable.
And, many games teach you about life. For me, it's roller-coaster tycoon. Others are brought in by the extremely popular civ set. Making quick decisions and taking calculated risks are skills that are marketable in today's type of work force.
Lastly, there's those people who using gaming to become better at there career. Race-car drivers, Air Force pilots, and the like have more training resources available to them because of the gaming industry. Those of us unlucky enough to not have such careers, can become more well-rounded by using these games to learn.
Of course, you can find just as many negatives as positives. I'll leave that argument to someone else. I've got to finish my work so I can go home and play my playstation 2.
I always lean towards less government interaction as any good Republican or Libertarian would do. So of course, the only stuff congress should do is make suggestions.
You know how the chemical industry uses a diamond to warn users of the risks of a substance right? How about doing the same for software? Here's the 4 areas I'd like to see:
1. Possibility of hidden holes vs. freely-available source:
Any software that's not open source will die on this one. How can your software be secure if there may be backdoors?
2. Establishment:
Any software that's been around since the sixties is going to be tested more than something written last year. Also, its easier to find help on newsgroups/webboards for established software.
3. Customization:
Most programs can be customized through a GUI interface, through the editing of a text file, or both. Traditionally, text files allow the most customization, but a killer GUI could also score well on this point. Also, software that is not released under a GPL-like agreement cannot be strengthened by an administrator. This sub-point could be probably be broken off into a new area.
4. Platform independance:
If the administration should change from one OS to another, its desirable to keep the same software. Flexibility in this regard equals safety. New-hire administrators are more likely to be knowledgable about software available for any platform. Also OS vendors who build security software for their own OS only are more likely to be concentrating on profitability over security.
Of course, these standards may be tough for some software vendors to acheive (no names here!). But that doesn't make them unimportant.
If we would have had these standards a long time ago, I don't think we'd be in the mess we are today.
A way to delete the contents of the URL bar without destroying the contents of my clipboard. Right now, I copy a URL from somewhere else, then click in the URL bar and hit delete, just to have the contents of the URL bar copied to my clipboard.
put your cursor at the beginning of the line, and then press cntrl-d.
For some reason, this works for Mozilla/Solaris, but not for Mozilla/linux. Can someone tell me why?
(I haven't tried it for Mozilla/Windoze)
Intoxicated bacteria help remove toxins!
All of these distributed projects reach into medical research and are as such a bit more useful than searching for ET [berkeley.edu] or cracking RC-5 [distributed.net].
Amen brother! Let's go to battle. I'll stack up our 4 prime number discoveries against anything you SETI people have found anyday!
No apologies here! I'm all for starting a flame war. May the most productive way to waste time win... and all that crap!
There are lots of reasons for joining primenet. Finding ET life is not one. It's more about discovering the beauties of mathematics than anything else.
As one whose been on this project for nearly two years, and has contributed 11.197 years of computational time into it, I feel as if I'm a large part of the project. In fact, there are only 1500 accounts higher than mine in the ranking.
If I was looking for the best way to reach E.T., I would have joined SETI. Saying that our goal is to find E.T. just because SETI is so popular is a big insult. I'm sure 1480 of the 1500 people ahead of me would agree.
The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search keeps all the large milestones here:
http://mersenne.org/status.htm
They haven't added #39 yet, but they probably will by the end of the day!!!
It's pretty easy. Believe it or not, the method to check whether they are primes or not involves FFT's. This means that integers are turned to floats to make use of the newest instructions available to processors today. Then, they are turned back to ints at the end of each iteration. Some checking is done to verify that nothing was lost in the rounding.
If something is lost in the rounding, the next person who does the check will find it. When they start the first iteration, a random seed is picked. At the end, the seed is "subtracted" from the residue. The residue will exactly match the residue from the first person who ran the primality test.
The float-to-int rounding error would cause the two testers to have entirely different residues. Also, there is no way to create the residue except to run the full primality test.
Of course, I should be referring you to the official FAQ's. But they're crappy.
If you want a good faq about the math of the system, read the mailing list FAQ's. These are much more interesting.
I get the "digest" form of the mailing list. Here's what I just received this afternoon:
My mirror of the digest
The ACLU protects civil liberties in name only.
There's been quite a few cases already where they have been against allowing kids to pray in schools (which kind of seems like a civil liberty to me!)
I don't care what you think about school prayer. Get rid of your preconceptions, and think about it. Should a group with the name "American Civil Liberties Union" be for or against allowing children to worship as they wish?
But this is what stood out to me. Bill Gates himself has now called slashdot "brilliant"! He could, of course, be talking about newsgroups. If you've spent much time there, you know the linux groups are much more friendly than the groups full of MS apologists. The truth is that people who write software, and give it away for free are friendly!
Once I was working on writing a driver for a network card on microcontroller hardware. I wrote to Alan Cox, to ask for help. My work had nothing to do with GNU or linux, but guess what.... He responded, and told me exactly what I needed to know! I doubt Ballmer would do that!
MS may try to copy our developer model, but it will never work. People in a corporate atmosphere cannot harness the full power of cooperation, because it's not in their nature.
These pants were purchased with a license for one user only. XP has detected that more than 3 pieces of hardware have been changed, which indicates they are being worn by someone not named in the signed agreement.
In 5 seconds, these pants will self-shred!
K-maps can be used in base 3 for evaluating base-3 logic expressions just as easily as it can for base-2 logic expressions. Simply look for m-by-n rectangles filled with 1's, or 2's, or 0's. Soon, you'll find that you'll need a few more gates for your average 4-input expression, but your average 4-input expression will be much more powerful.
The poster never even considered all the implications of a base-3 k-map. Sure, it's hard to do in a short slashdot post. But, there are advantages to be found. "It's too complicated" is a cheap excuse, and has held up progress many times.
Adding up the pros and cons of an idea can be tricky. We already know there are plenty of "pros" for such a system. (lookups and insertions into a trinary tree can be faster than in a binary tree). We've started to evaluate the "cons" but it's still way to early to know which will win.
Cynicism has its time and place. It's very good to have when considering bringing a product to market or not. But, that's not where we are. The author had no intention of convincing anyone to throw their binary computers out the window. It's merely an idea that has not been studied much. A couple of computers were built in the '60s, and nothing more.
What an attitude! I find it hard to believe you'll ever get hired as an engineer. Making stuff like this work is the dream of a good engineer. Your desire to explore needs to be greater than your desire to be comfortable.
A lot of these challenges have already been solved. Some of them were solved 100 years ago (read the article). Many of your examples are things that may seem complicated to us using 3-way logic, but may actually be more efficient once we fully understand the properties.
Good Link on ternary systems
I know a few people are going to call me a linux zealot for this, and I'll be modded down, but discovering a "whole new world" like this happens all the time when people discover Unix.
Me? I'm started off as an EE. Hardware guy. I couldn't make heads or tails out of software. I hated working with computers (win3.1 and win95) and thought that any job with them would suck.
Fall '97, I transfered to U of I (that's Illinois, not Iowa). Found out that to read my email, I had to log into a system that ran Unix (which I thought had died out somewhere around 1975). Soon, I had it mastered. I became 1337 when I took shell scripts to finger all your friends rewrote them in perl to print out neat little tables in color (using VT100 codes).
It was just the beginning. Soon, I got a job teaching new students how to use Unix. I borrowed a couple RedHat 5.2 disks from a TA, and installed them (what I consider to be the largest upgrade I've ever made). I learned vi (learned some emacs too, but am not proud of it). And I'm a changed man.
I finished out my EE classes, but went and got a minor in CS. Now, I work at [bleep] using my perl/C/shell skills and am busy forgetting about CMOS and opamps and the like.
Life is fun. I hope these chaps coming from the prisons find it as enjoyable as me.
The problem has been JoeShmoeProgrammerPro who writes driver installation scripts that remove dll's from the user's machines. XP will make sees a request to remove twain32.dll, and quickly makes a backup copy. Joe's script replaces twain32.dll with you-know-what, and XP doesn't complain. Then, when Joe's script is done, XP copies the original twain32.dll back.
Is it good, or is it bad? Obviously, it's bad because it doesn't tell the user anything about what happened. But, similair stuff in MillE has worked, and, generally, people like it.
(and also free of all those annoying categories.)
Anyone who hates ads needs to look at the great job AltaVista has done with this:
http://www.altavista.com/sites/search/text
The reason the audio has popps and clicks was because it was ripped from a copy-protected CD?
Maybe I'm going insane. I can't believe we have such inept people in congress.