That reads as if the bacterial population in question, when it activates to "burn itself out", just becomes ineffective on its own. A major reason quorum sensing is useful to bacteria is that it delays detection by the immune system until there's enough bacteria that the immune system has a difficult time destroying the whole population. Triggering the bacteria to attack before reaching high enough numbers doesn't just weaken their attack. It also gives the immune system a head start of its own because it can react to the released chemicals before they are released all at once at dangerous levels.
The game and the engine are two separate properties. You can have a closed-license game thta runs on an open-licensed engine. You can't close up their GPLed engine as if it was BSD-licensed, but you can certainly release a game with proprietary models, textures, music, maps, and scripting. None of those things are object code linked to the engine. They're all just data as far as the engine is concerned.
Better yet, if you can detect a specific dangerous bacterium early and convince it to attack the body before it actually has an effective population maybe the body's immune system will have an easy time of it.
There just hasn't been enough interest in busting that particular scheme yet. If they'll use OCR, then color-specific OCR isn't that much of a stretch.
So 12.5% of the time, the bot gets all three right.
Look at it another way:
1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 = 1/8
So now the bot has to try 8 whole times, on average, for each new account.
We use computers for combinatorics because they're better at systematically trying all the combinations than we are.
If I have 8 threads each trying to break your example every two seconds, I get a new spam account every two seconds. The program to do so is trivial to implement.
You have a decent concept, but your example is far too simplistic to deter anyone.
Imagine showing different overhead shots of a parking lot at different times. Ask which car is in row X and Y spaces from the Z where X and Y vary and Z is randomly left or right. Only show N rows (which varies) of the O rows on the lot in a given picture. Ask a question like "What color is the vehicle in space 4 of row I?", and do not give multiple choices for them to answer. This requires the bot to recognize the labels on the rows, to associate the row labels to the rows, to figure out what color boundaries are a vehicle, and to provide a reasonable name for the color. All of this still has several weaknesses. The bot could always answer "blue", "red", "black", or "silver", which is a reasonable way to name a lot of shades of cars. Unless new images and their indexed possible answers are added on a regular basis, the bot just builds its own reverse database of image checksums, questions, and correct answers. A bot could pick the most common color in the photograph which doesn't appear to be the parking lot surface, or just the second most common overall (assuming there's no grassy islands, in which case it's the third most common overall) and answer that.
The problem is that we're asking one set of computer programmers to outdo another set of computer programmers in the cleverness of their respective programs. The CAPTCHA programs are no more clever as their programmers can make them, and the registration bots are no less clever than their programmers can make them. Furthermore, there are many more programmers trying to outsmart a large service like Google or Yahoo than there are trying to prevent the registrations. It takes a very smart programmer to write a program to outsmart the programs of any other random programmers. What's worse is that in some cases the spam bot designers get humans to answer CAPTCHA questions either through payments or trickery.
It is not so easy an issue as to wave around a small number of multiple choices and hope the computer doesn't click "C" every time.
A game can generally be run inside a debugger or inside a virtualized Windows instance. DRM and anti-cheating measures might be part of the equation, but I'd bet that part is very small compared to the parts played by market share and DirectX.
If you mean that most game companies prefer DirectX to OpenGL or SDL for developing games and Microsoft developed DirectX (or bought someone who did and makes updates to it -- I don't recall), then yes, Microsoft plays a very big part in that.
MS does some nasty things and I don't care for them as a company, but some credit for what they do right wouldn't kill you.
I hope the console does come out and does reasonably well.
I don't have an HD set myself yet, either. I do have plenty of ways to get different signal and cable types into my SD sets that don't involve a dedicated VGA to something converter, though.
I don't have an HD-capable game system other than my PC, which has its own dedicated monitor. My wife and I decided we don't watch enough TV to make it worthwhile to have cable or satellite. Until our SD sets crap out or enough content over the air and on discs comes in HD and makes good use of the resolution (not just upsampled SD crap or HD sitcoms for that the pictures don't matter much anyway) we'll not be upgrading. Getting the signal into an SD set has never been a problem for us, though.
Fair enough. My DVD recorder and external SD DTV tuner both have S-Video, composite, component, and HDMI in and composite, component, HDMI, and S-Video out, but maybe not everyone is so lucky.
The Lenovo IdeaCentre K220 is around $570 street and it has S-Video out standard. That is quite a bit more than the console quoted, but it's actually launched by a company that should be around a while to provide a warranty.
Last I checked, most of the existing consoles didn't come with S-Video cables. Most of them come with, if anything, composite video and stereo audio. HDMI, S-Video, or component adapters are typically add-ons except the higher-end console editions like the 360 Elite. S-Video or HDMI is usually a $30 to $40 add-on for existing consoles anyway. That is a plus for this supposed console over them, then, but it doesn't make it a weakness of a PC to require an adapter.
The community is a big issue. I haven't a PS3 of my own, but a friend of mine and I put both on his PS3 for comparison. We never asked the communities for support, so I can't speak to that. I'll take your advice under consideration.
What I can say for sure is that my friend much preferred the configuration and package selection of the initial Fedora installation to that of YDL. Those are issues that could be overcome, and are probably issues the YDL is working on for newer versions anyway. The community, after the point of that initial impression, may turn out to be a much bigger factor.
Another thing my friend really preferred about Fedora is that it's essentially the same distro he can run elsewhere in almost every way not dictated by the hardware differences. YDL may be based on CentOS, but it certainly didn't seem like one could count on YDL being quite like anything he could install on other systems. Since he runs three or four different hardware platforms at any given time, that's an important issue for him.
The car analogy might just fail. With proper maintenance and a garage for storage, you can drive the same car for twenty or thirty years. With some luck and some extra maintenance, we have running cars around from a century ago. Sure, most people let their cars undergo some extra wear and trade for a newer model, but not everyone does.
I don't get rid of a car until the maintenance becomes more expensive than the payments on a newer car or someone totals my car out on the road. I almost never buy brand new even then. Let someone who cares about new car smell pay the first year of depreciation.
My gaming rig at home is getting long in the tooth, so I'll probably build something newer in a few months from parts a generation or so old from NewEgg. My work PCs, though, don't have to do much more now than five years ago. This post is from an Athlon 1000, which might soon get upgraded all the way to an Athlon XP 2400+ or a Sempron 2800 and its Socket 754 motherboard pulled from another machine. The main problem with this PC isn't the processor, but the cost of adding more PC-133 RAM rather than replacing the motherboard and using cheaper DDR or DDR2.
Those old applications under six layers of emulators are typically assumed to Just Work, too, and that's one reason why IBM mainframes are still sold for large sums of money. The I/O bandwidth compared to smaller iron is another.
Hopefully the DOS version was implemented by a software company that has since implemented newer versions and has provided their customers an upgrade path. It's hard to tell when buying software for a vertical market like veterinary office management which software house will still be in business 15 years after you buy their product.
This is one of the main reasons for Open Source Software, and particularly for the FSF's idea of Free Software. If someone buys a software package and has the source, another programmer can be hired to update or port that software. Without the application's source, we're talking about either supporting a legacy environment for the sake of the package he needs or finding a way to get the data out of what could be a convoluted proprietary binary storage format.
I'm not saying that all software needs to be open and have lots of liberal license terms protecting the buyer. I am saying that not having those extra license terms protecting the buyer carries a cost in some situations that has nothing to do with the upfront charges for the package. Those costs need to be weighed and considered just like any others.
A cheap single-channel SCSI card and a DDS3 or DDS4 SCSI tape drive should back up any drive you have in a Pentium 100 with plenty of room to spare. Alternatively, an IDE CD-RW drive is about $15.
You might not have a way to add an IDE port to the 486 if you are out of them or to add the SCSI card, but there are plenty of ISA, EISA, PCI, and even VESA-LB cards for either on the net that are working pulls or surplus factory-sealed stock.
If so, then how about Staples? See the specs at the eMachines website since Staples doesn't make the port info clear.
Maybe you want both DVI and HDMI in place of your beloved S-Video? No problem. Walmart has the Dell Studio Hybrid. They stock it right in the store in some locations. It can also be shipped from the website to your address or shipped for free to any store when purchased on the website with their site-to-store option.
It could be what he gets for posting while having that PITA EVO website open in another tab. It apparently takes a lot of ActionScript code for a website to look so crappy, be so annoying, and be so user-unfriendly all at once.
True, but that's pretty good as an add-on for their mainframe OS that predates Unix and shares no code with AT&T Unix. z/OS dates back through System 390, MVS, SVS, and back to OS/PCP in 1964. IBM with System 390 introduced a Unix compatibility layer and had it certified under z/OS.
AIX on Power is Unix 03 certified if you really need a more modern Unix from IBM. AIX though is descended from Unix itself and is only a Unix. z/OS reached certification as a Unix while still being able to run software written for MVT in the 1960s. Try running some complex application written for v3 on OS X, Solaris, Linux, NetBSD, or AIX and see how that goes.
AIX, Linux (as or 1999), and OpenSolaris (as of 2008) also run on System z besides z/OS. They might not be Certified Unix, but they'll probably get the job done, too.
Solaris, OpenSolaris, Java, and the CPU tech at Sun are my bets for IBM's favorite assets there. With x86, Power, Cell, and Sparc talent under one umbrella and Solaris, AIX, Linux to run on the hardware IBM could really make some changes in the industry.
By buying Solaris, IBM will have some level of certification on x86, Power, System z, and Sparc. Currently it only has Power and System z. Sun will also be combined with one of the only two entities with LDAP certified software solutions (IBM and Apache).
z/OS, AIX, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, ReactOS, WinCE (which is not the same OS as the NT-based OSes for x86 hardware at all), QNX, VxWorks, eCos, Symbian, OpenSolaris, whatever RIM calls the Blackberry OS (is the OS just called "Blackberry"?), eComStation, ReactOS, MorphOS, Haiku, and Palm's WebOS seem to still be active, to name a few.
Call them all irrelevant if you want, but in that case you can call Windows Starter Edition (or whatever they call it), Windows Ultimate, Windows Small Business Server, about 7990 to 13,990 of the Linux distros, and OS X on everything but the Mac irrelevant too.
That's a little bit backwards. IBM and Ford are both solvent. Sun and GM are both having issues in that department due to lack of sales and high overhead.
I'm not sure about the state-specific one, but the US federal minimum wage in 1995 was $4.25 an hour. See a historical list of the US minimum wage for some perspective.
That works out, if he paid two other people minimum for 40 hours a week, to about $17,700 total in wages. Then there's the employer's portion of their income taxes, of course. So $84k - $22k = $62k. So he could have made about the equivalent of 7 times the minimum wage himself.
If they were making $28k each as partners, that's still around $13.50/hour and about 3 times minimum. That's not bad for a small startup without a venture capitalist behind it. It sure beats flipping burgers.
Slashdot Mirror
That reads as if the bacterial population in question, when it activates to "burn itself out", just becomes ineffective on its own. A major reason quorum sensing is useful to bacteria is that it delays detection by the immune system until there's enough bacteria that the immune system has a difficult time destroying the whole population. Triggering the bacteria to attack before reaching high enough numbers doesn't just weaken their attack. It also gives the immune system a head start of its own because it can react to the released chemicals before they are released all at once at dangerous levels.
The game and the engine are two separate properties. You can have a closed-license game thta runs on an open-licensed engine. You can't close up their GPLed engine as if it was BSD-licensed, but you can certainly release a game with proprietary models, textures, music, maps, and scripting. None of those things are object code linked to the engine. They're all just data as far as the engine is concerned.
Better yet, if you can detect a specific dangerous bacterium early and convince it to attack the body before it actually has an effective population maybe the body's immune system will have an easy time of it.
There just hasn't been enough interest in busting that particular scheme yet. If they'll use OCR, then color-specific OCR isn't that much of a stretch.
Question 1: yes/no = 50%
Question 2: yes/no = 50%
Question 3: yes/no = 50%
total: 0.5 * 0.5 * 0.5 = 0.125
So 12.5% of the time, the bot gets all three right.
Look at it another way:
1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 = 1/8
So now the bot has to try 8 whole times, on average, for each new account.
We use computers for combinatorics because they're better at systematically trying all the combinations than we are.
If I have 8 threads each trying to break your example every two seconds, I get a new spam account every two seconds. The program to do so is trivial to implement.
You have a decent concept, but your example is far too simplistic to deter anyone.
Imagine showing different overhead shots of a parking lot at different times. Ask which car is in row X and Y spaces from the Z where X and Y vary and Z is randomly left or right. Only show N rows (which varies) of the O rows on the lot in a given picture. Ask a question like "What color is the vehicle in space 4 of row I?", and do not give multiple choices for them to answer. This requires the bot to recognize the labels on the rows, to associate the row labels to the rows, to figure out what color boundaries are a vehicle, and to provide a reasonable name for the color. All of this still has several weaknesses. The bot could always answer "blue", "red", "black", or "silver", which is a reasonable way to name a lot of shades of cars. Unless new images and their indexed possible answers are added on a regular basis, the bot just builds its own reverse database of image checksums, questions, and correct answers. A bot could pick the most common color in the photograph which doesn't appear to be the parking lot surface, or just the second most common overall (assuming there's no grassy islands, in which case it's the third most common overall) and answer that.
The problem is that we're asking one set of computer programmers to outdo another set of computer programmers in the cleverness of their respective programs. The CAPTCHA programs are no more clever as their programmers can make them, and the registration bots are no less clever than their programmers can make them. Furthermore, there are many more programmers trying to outsmart a large service like Google or Yahoo than there are trying to prevent the registrations. It takes a very smart programmer to write a program to outsmart the programs of any other random programmers. What's worse is that in some cases the spam bot designers get humans to answer CAPTCHA questions either through payments or trickery.
It is not so easy an issue as to wave around a small number of multiple choices and hope the computer doesn't click "C" every time.
A game can generally be run inside a debugger or inside a virtualized Windows instance. DRM and anti-cheating measures might be part of the equation, but I'd bet that part is very small compared to the parts played by market share and DirectX.
If you mean that most game companies prefer DirectX to OpenGL or SDL for developing games and Microsoft developed DirectX (or bought someone who did and makes updates to it -- I don't recall), then yes, Microsoft plays a very big part in that.
MS does some nasty things and I don't care for them as a company, but some credit for what they do right wouldn't kill you.
I hope the console does come out and does reasonably well.
I don't have an HD set myself yet, either. I do have plenty of ways to get different signal and cable types into my SD sets that don't involve a dedicated VGA to something converter, though.
I don't have an HD-capable game system other than my PC, which has its own dedicated monitor. My wife and I decided we don't watch enough TV to make it worthwhile to have cable or satellite. Until our SD sets crap out or enough content over the air and on discs comes in HD and makes good use of the resolution (not just upsampled SD crap or HD sitcoms for that the pictures don't matter much anyway) we'll not be upgrading. Getting the signal into an SD set has never been a problem for us, though.
Fair enough. My DVD recorder and external SD DTV tuner both have S-Video, composite, component, and HDMI in and composite, component, HDMI, and S-Video out, but maybe not everyone is so lucky.
The Lenovo IdeaCentre K220 is around $570 street and it has S-Video out standard. That is quite a bit more than the console quoted, but it's actually launched by a company that should be around a while to provide a warranty.
Last I checked, most of the existing consoles didn't come with S-Video cables. Most of them come with, if anything, composite video and stereo audio. HDMI, S-Video, or component adapters are typically add-ons except the higher-end console editions like the 360 Elite. S-Video or HDMI is usually a $30 to $40 add-on for existing consoles anyway. That is a plus for this supposed console over them, then, but it doesn't make it a weakness of a PC to require an adapter.
The community is a big issue. I haven't a PS3 of my own, but a friend of mine and I put both on his PS3 for comparison. We never asked the communities for support, so I can't speak to that. I'll take your advice under consideration.
What I can say for sure is that my friend much preferred the configuration and package selection of the initial Fedora installation to that of YDL. Those are issues that could be overcome, and are probably issues the YDL is working on for newer versions anyway. The community, after the point of that initial impression, may turn out to be a much bigger factor.
Another thing my friend really preferred about Fedora is that it's essentially the same distro he can run elsewhere in almost every way not dictated by the hardware differences. YDL may be based on CentOS, but it certainly didn't seem like one could count on YDL being quite like anything he could install on other systems. Since he runs three or four different hardware platforms at any given time, that's an important issue for him.
The car analogy might just fail. With proper maintenance and a garage for storage, you can drive the same car for twenty or thirty years. With some luck and some extra maintenance, we have running cars around from a century ago. Sure, most people let their cars undergo some extra wear and trade for a newer model, but not everyone does.
I don't get rid of a car until the maintenance becomes more expensive than the payments on a newer car or someone totals my car out on the road. I almost never buy brand new even then. Let someone who cares about new car smell pay the first year of depreciation.
My gaming rig at home is getting long in the tooth, so I'll probably build something newer in a few months from parts a generation or so old from NewEgg. My work PCs, though, don't have to do much more now than five years ago. This post is from an Athlon 1000, which might soon get upgraded all the way to an Athlon XP 2400+ or a Sempron 2800 and its Socket 754 motherboard pulled from another machine. The main problem with this PC isn't the processor, but the cost of adding more PC-133 RAM rather than replacing the motherboard and using cheaper DDR or DDR2.
Those old applications under six layers of emulators are typically assumed to Just Work, too, and that's one reason why IBM mainframes are still sold for large sums of money. The I/O bandwidth compared to smaller iron is another.
If the software that matters is DOS, then FreeDOS under a VM on Linux or XP (or for that matter Vista, Solaris, or OS X) may be an option.
Hopefully the DOS version was implemented by a software company that has since implemented newer versions and has provided their customers an upgrade path. It's hard to tell when buying software for a vertical market like veterinary office management which software house will still be in business 15 years after you buy their product.
This is one of the main reasons for Open Source Software, and particularly for the FSF's idea of Free Software. If someone buys a software package and has the source, another programmer can be hired to update or port that software. Without the application's source, we're talking about either supporting a legacy environment for the sake of the package he needs or finding a way to get the data out of what could be a convoluted proprietary binary storage format.
I'm not saying that all software needs to be open and have lots of liberal license terms protecting the buyer. I am saying that not having those extra license terms protecting the buyer carries a cost in some situations that has nothing to do with the upfront charges for the package. Those costs need to be weighed and considered just like any others.
A cheap single-channel SCSI card and a DDS3 or DDS4 SCSI tape drive should back up any drive you have in a Pentium 100 with plenty of room to spare. Alternatively, an IDE CD-RW drive is about $15.
You might not have a way to add an IDE port to the 486 if you are out of them or to add the SCSI card, but there are plenty of ISA, EISA, PCI, and even VESA-LB cards for either on the net that are working pulls or surplus factory-sealed stock.
Check out WeirdStuff, PC Surplus Online, or PacificGeek.com for what you need. Just please don't buy the last of the ISA SCSI cards before I get another one. ;-)
There's also the Zaurus, but that actually shipped too. There are the Nokia Internet Tablets as well.
Take a look at the LinuxDevices.com list of PDAs and mobile Linux devices that includes ebook readers, data terminals, media players, IM/SMS terminals, watches, and more that run Linux as designed or have had Linux ported to them.
Is HDMI okay?
If so, then how about Staples? See the specs at the eMachines website since Staples doesn't make the port info clear.
Maybe you want both DVI and HDMI in place of your beloved S-Video? No problem. Walmart has the Dell Studio Hybrid. They stock it right in the store in some locations. It can also be shipped from the website to your address or shipped for free to any store when purchased on the website with their site-to-store option.
Fedora supports the PS3, so why putter around with YDL?
They even expect a GCC for the SPUs by the time Fedora 11 is released.
The PS3 also has a severe lack of RAM when you compare it to a 2GB machine.
It could be what he gets for posting while having that PITA EVO website open in another tab. It apparently takes a lot of ActionScript code for a website to look so crappy, be so annoying, and be so user-unfriendly all at once.
True, but that's pretty good as an add-on for their mainframe OS that predates Unix and shares no code with AT&T Unix. z/OS dates back through System 390, MVS, SVS, and back to OS/PCP in 1964. IBM with System 390 introduced a Unix compatibility layer and had it certified under z/OS.
AIX on Power is Unix 03 certified if you really need a more modern Unix from IBM. AIX though is descended from Unix itself and is only a Unix. z/OS reached certification as a Unix while still being able to run software written for MVT in the 1960s. Try running some complex application written for v3 on OS X, Solaris, Linux, NetBSD, or AIX and see how that goes.
AIX, Linux (as or 1999), and OpenSolaris (as of 2008) also run on System z besides z/OS. They might not be Certified Unix, but they'll probably get the job done, too.
Solaris, OpenSolaris, Java, and the CPU tech at Sun are my bets for IBM's favorite assets there. With x86, Power, Cell, and Sparc talent under one umbrella and Solaris, AIX, Linux to run on the hardware IBM could really make some changes in the industry.
By buying Solaris, IBM will have some level of certification on x86, Power, System z, and Sparc. Currently it only has Power and System z. Sun will also be combined with one of the only two entities with LDAP certified software solutions (IBM and Apache).
Oh, an unqualified, irrational, and completely unsupported ad hominem attack! I bow to you, oh lord of the debate!
z/OS, AIX, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, ReactOS, WinCE (which is not the same OS as the NT-based OSes for x86 hardware at all), QNX, VxWorks, eCos, Symbian, OpenSolaris, whatever RIM calls the Blackberry OS (is the OS just called "Blackberry"?), eComStation, ReactOS, MorphOS, Haiku, and Palm's WebOS seem to still be active, to name a few.
Call them all irrelevant if you want, but in that case you can call Windows Starter Edition (or whatever they call it), Windows Ultimate, Windows Small Business Server, about 7990 to 13,990 of the Linux distros, and OS X on everything but the Mac irrelevant too.
That's a little bit backwards. IBM and Ford are both solvent. Sun and GM are both having issues in that department due to lack of sales and high overhead.
I'm not sure about the state-specific one, but the US federal minimum wage in 1995 was $4.25 an hour. See a historical list of the US minimum wage for some perspective.
That works out, if he paid two other people minimum for 40 hours a week, to about $17,700 total in wages. Then there's the employer's portion of their income taxes, of course. So $84k - $22k = $62k. So he could have made about the equivalent of 7 times the minimum wage himself.
If they were making $28k each as partners, that's still around $13.50/hour and about 3 times minimum. That's not bad for a small startup without a venture capitalist behind it. It sure beats flipping burgers.