The Turing Tournament at Cal Tech wants to distribute $20,000 of the school's funds to their 'internet friends', Caltech friends, and other IVY league schoolers whom they would explain the contest to in human terms.
The contest strives to limit the accessibility of other people by not using human terms whenever possible, and by making the contest information as uninteresting and hard to follow and understand as possible to regular internet visitors to keep the pool as low as possible.
This decreases the chance high school kids or other 2 and 4 year college students would know about this since their professors would not read the dready explanations that they would then have to interpret and explain to students, when the rules and explanations should have been obviously simple to understand already.
Since the attempt is clearly to have a small amount of entries, this makes the competition mostly garbage."
Seriously, their page says it was made with LaTeX2HTML, but they only wrote that because they seriously knew they wouldn't have fooled anyone with telling us the directions were written by a human.
ATI All In Wonder cards have come with Guide+ support for free. You set-up recording times and view the tv schedule using a software program that also shows ads on the time. There is no cost for that, and it has been that way for many years. All you do is buy the All In Wonder card.
Of course, I never owned one, but I'm sure that's the case.
Give me a damn break, any idiot can follow the instructions to build a computer usually easier than putting together that cheap furniure you buy at Target.
So true. And as for exceptions to this... WELL GET PROFESSIONAL HELP--shops. Therefore, there's not such a need for computer repair shops as there is for autoshops and salons. The few that exist (why?) are too few to deem certification practical.
Why: Most people buy a new computer or figure out how to upgrade their memory, hard drive, video card, or processor themselves (if even they want to upgrade.) Computer shops are for 1) idiots (to the computing world), 2) corporations to license for use, and 3) people who have to use them to fix a part under warranty.
Case 1 and 2, the shop will know what to do with the PC better than the beginning consumer or company administration could know. Case 3, it is for warranty, plus the PC manufacturer 'trains' this shop... no brainer to use them.
Yes, now every local candidate can compete, cheap and easy... using e-mail and phone spam.
For the cost of just THE LIST:::
1) Political candidate buys list of 1,000,000 numbers (1M expected by Mass.)
2) Candidate limits list to his/her county/district/city. (Easy--uses a phone book for area codes and the first three numbers.)
A candidate for a county of 600,000 people can expect to have 100,000 appropriate phone numbers.
(The original list represents 1 / 6th of the state's population, so we divide 600K by 6.)
3) Political candidate emails his MOST DEDICATED 2,000 supporters 50 unique phone numbers each. In the e-mail, he would say
"If you could call up these 50 people by (three days before election) and tell them to root for me, that would be great. Oh, and this way, each of us will get a call from one of the supporters. Just act sincere and don't divulge that you are taking part!:)
Oh, and just as a test, if you don't get a call, please let me know! Finally, if you are gonna be out of town, yada, yada, yada, please reply and let me know."
The trick?
EITHER WOULD WORK: 1) The candidate would make sure to put just ONE supporter's number into someone else's list. OR 2) If he wasn't too busy, he'd just put his cell phone number on each list.**
He would probably do both (48 real voters, 1 supporter, and himself, the latter two randomly scattered but near the bottom:) )
This way, he will know as the deadline approaches, which person has called or not. He will count his many calls he personally got (meaning the number of lists that have gone through, and each list is 48 real people) and know if this is working or not working before the election even starts.
The dozen people who reply that they can't do the list, the politician will call that person's list personally (which is good, too.)
But for the people who never call by (three days before election), he will know by never seeing supporter "Bob'" personal phone number on caller ID. The other way is if supporter "SAMMY", who was on Bob's list, reports to the candidate like instructed and says he wasn't called. The candidate would know sammy was on Bob's list.
The lists that didn't work our or were cancelled early on due to yadayadayada, the politican would call himself (he would still have three days left.)
- Yes I made this all up, but it is so feasible it's not funny. I could make this text look pretty, but that would take even longer than it did to make this.
If there's a computing project to distribe XBox's private key, then is it really private?
In either case, you don't need the original key. Just get a good locksmithing set. I've never heard of a lock that big though.
All kidding aside however, I've seen a photo of an XBox with the cover off (don't arrest me.) It wasn't gruesome, but it is possible to get inside. What's this hoopla;x
Yes, the are used. Some recent article listed the popular searches for 2002. It also had a table of popular search engines by queries done a day, in millions. After Google, Yahoo, AOL, MSN, and possibly Lycos, AskJeeves was #6 or so.
This could be because some partner sites automatically query Ask.com. I think each site reported its own statistics. Google was visited the most times each day, with Yahoo near-by (probably for mail and games.)
And, users frequently returned to Google and spent the most time at Google (11 mins I think) other than AOL (15 mins.)
Nobody cares about processing cycles, you aren't coding some game on an Atari system to make a widget go up and down and left and right or reduce flicker. If many clients buy a computer for the purpose of running one type of database software, they won't care if the software takes half the computer processing, be it a '92 system or a 3.18 Ghz system. People want solutions to problems (programming), not fancy shmancy coding.
If you are going to be programming in the real business word, the product is what matters, not how you got there (both to you and the client.) There's a point when CS majors have to step into the real world and actually make things happen, and make things happen NOW, not just theorize about the best and most elegant way to get to point B.
Visual C++ 6.0 would be even more limited without Windows API. At least with VB you could get most everything done.
However, if you needed some occasional API code like you described, then just consult some example code using google.com. It's really easier now than six years ago when I picked up the language!
All we need is the largest Chip manufacturer, the largest PC manufacturer, and the largest O.S. manufacturer teaming up on things like this. Add NEC, Maxtor, NVidia, and [sic]holy crap snow is falling from the roof around me[/sic] Micron.
I was just thinking about how much people like you and I are played by this "Western Government". The deal is, I went to my state's web site to try to figure out how to run for Senator, Governor, etc. Yes, maybe I'm not old enough yet, but there was still no information! The best way (only way) right now is to be an intern and watch over some guy who did that too and move up.
What if you're just a simple decent qualified person who wants to run for Selectman/Mayor/Rep/Senator/Governor/President? I went to the Senate's web site, for instance (and many others using google) trying to find out HOW TO RUN! This information is just not on the internet (at least not for my state.)
Just yesterday I thought it would be sweet if there was a web site people could go to to see how to run for political leadership in their state. At least paperwork and deadlines would be greate, but procedures, rules, and regulations in addition, would be excellent!
Seriously, at least 100 million people in the USA are qualified to run for those positions I mentioned (at least by the age rule set in the constitution.)
I want to see competition, I want to see REAL people running! What would REALLY be sweet would be a law by the Senators to make States maintain a web site like I described and one that would also show WHO is running and what they DO and what they have DONE. This would be so sweet. And each candidate would have his own web site hosted (or just linked.) FAIRNESS IN EVERY WAY!
Nobody votes because theres a bunch of bums we don't know anything about who have a gazillion of ties and responsibilities, once in office, to the people who got them there!!!
This would be a pretty cheap way for equal spending that everybody keeps pushing for, good for communicating at least with voters that have access to the internet (the majority.)
That's how the IP thing works! If you use a direct connection to the internet (i.e., no router or WAP to pass through), then the link in my sig should work.... It rolls over the numbers over 256 or 512 etc and uses the remainder.. The end result is an IP that points to slashdot!
My signature has had the biggest IP of anyone here for months..
Have a fall-back job in case CS doesn't work out:)
on
When Tech Schools Go Bad?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
No, seriously.:)
My cousin graduated from ### in 2002 for Computer Science. Well, he installs Cat 5 now for a living. (I believe he had a high GPA, too.)
If even he can't get a job, how am I supposed to when I attend a community college for the same field? People aren't getting jobs in Computer Science recently; instead, they are losing jobs. And, it seems that people who are hired (or stay) have to work crazy hours! And the third kicker is that even if he *is* hired, then even he won't be paid more than $30,000 (versus hundreds of thousands in the dot com boom) to start, most likely than not. All this, while doing more work than a programmer previously probably ever had to.
With programming losing its dignity, and the 1% female rate in classes, I'm going NUTS. The hardest part about switching majors is that the other major I've been considering for the past two days is not offered at my school.
I am thinking I could use my love for programming in personal projects while working many weird jobs in the mean time.
That's why I believe the best plan for me will be to resign from ############## and attend the other college.
I guess CS was worth it back when pay and hiring was at a high, but exploring other interests now that the light has shown itself seems like the best idea for me. It used to be that the Visual Arts major I'm thinking about was the interest and CS was a sure thing to fall back on, while now it could sadly be true to think the opposite!!
Let me be the first to say this: CS majors should be ready to fall back on some similar venture or another venture that they would enjoy doing, in case CS doesn't work out!;x
I'm gonna have to say it.
on
Wi-Fi From The Sky
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Forbes talked about their list of 85 world-changing ideas.
Wi-Fi is coming up, and that will be the biggest world-changing things ever in the future. Imagine always being connected to everybody else in the world who you'd want to be connected to. How screwed up is that?
Oh wait. Cell phones can do that. Damn. Oh well, it doesn't mean I'm going to let this post go waste!:) Why? Because Wi-Fi will do to cell phones what cable/dsl did to land-line dial-up. Man I was just imagining all levels of students using wi-fi tablets in school and that's kind of messed up.... !
A lot of people will now be able to listen to free music anywhere, via internet radio.
There goes the RIAA. Also, this could cause us to lose our hearing of the sounds usually omitted from the tracks during MP3 encoding.
And what about radio waves everywhere? And people instant messsaging each other non-stop?
I know it's kind of scary and weird, but this future could all be possible in under five years. And once we get to wi-fi everywhere, there's no going back! And hackers will be able to DOS my toaster.
Full source release under the GPL? Yes! This is unprecedented for Apogee! I suppose this is the second xmas gift we've been waiting for since last year? I think I'll be opening a new section on my website now for this source code, and maybe host modifications.
Probably the first order of business here is to strip out the old audio library and other unneeded/Watcom-only portions, then try to port this thing over so it will compile in Visual Studio. Also looks like there are a few assembly files that need to be eliminated or converted to C, but not too many.
Today we're doing something I bet most everyone out there thought we'd never do. No, it's not Duke Nukem Forever, but something some folks on the net have been asking us to do for ages. Today we're releasing the source code to Rise of the Triad! The source is being released under the GPL license, and we still retain copyright on the game (plus we still sell Rise of the Triad), but folks have been asking for something like this for a long time, and here it is.
We are dedicating the release of the Rise of the Triad Source code to our late friend and Rise of the Triad programmer William Scarboro, who died tragically back in early August of 2002. I'm sure if he were still with us, William would be happy to see this out there, and see what folks might do with the code.
In the archive are some thoughts about Rise of the Triad by Tom Hall (the game's producer), and Scott Miller (Apogee/3DR CEO/Founder). You can check out the readme here before downloading the entire archive. In addition to this file, we have several other ROTT related downlods available - check out our ROTT page for the full list.
The folks reading this who aren't programmers probably won't have any interest in this, but those who are programmers might want to check it out. You can download the file (which is roughly 4Mb zipped) here:
ftp://ftp.3drealms.com/source/rottsource.zip
Enjoy! Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone. See ya next year!
Slashdot Mirror
They SHOULD have said:
The Turing Tournament at Cal Tech wants to distribute $20,000 of the school's funds to their 'internet friends', Caltech friends, and other IVY league schoolers whom they would explain the contest to in human terms.
The contest strives to limit the accessibility of other people by not using human terms whenever possible, and by making the contest information as uninteresting and hard to follow and understand as possible to regular internet visitors to keep the pool as low as possible.
This decreases the chance high school kids or other 2 and 4 year college students would know about this since their professors would not read the dready explanations that they would then have to interpret and explain to students, when the rules and explanations should have been obviously simple to understand already.
Since the attempt is clearly to have a small amount of entries, this makes the competition mostly garbage."
Seriously, their page says it was made with LaTeX2HTML, but they only wrote that because they seriously knew they wouldn't have fooled anyone with telling us the directions were written by a human.
" 'the fuck? "
ATI All In Wonder cards have come with Guide+ support for free. You set-up recording times and view the tv schedule using a software program that also shows ads on the time. There is no cost for that, and it has been that way for many years. All you do is buy the All In Wonder card.
Of course, I never owned one, but I'm sure that's the case.
Give me a damn break, any idiot can follow the instructions to build a computer usually easier than putting together that cheap furniure you buy at Target.
So true. And as for exceptions to this... WELL GET PROFESSIONAL HELP--shops. Therefore, there's not such a need for computer repair shops as there is for autoshops and salons. The few that exist (why?) are too few to deem certification practical.
Why:
Most people buy a new computer or figure out how to upgrade their memory, hard drive, video card, or processor themselves (if even they want to upgrade.) Computer shops are for 1) idiots (to the computing world), 2) corporations to license for use, and 3) people who have to use them to fix a part under warranty.
Case 1 and 2, the shop will know what to do with the PC better than the beginning consumer or company administration could know. Case 3, it is for warranty, plus the PC manufacturer 'trains' this shop... no brainer to use them.
Yes.
:)
:) )
Yes, now every local candidate can compete, cheap and easy... using e-mail and phone spam.
For the cost of just THE LIST:::
1) Political candidate buys list of 1,000,000 numbers (1M expected by Mass.)
2) Candidate limits list to his/her county/district/city. (Easy--uses a phone book for area codes and the first three numbers.)
A candidate for a county of 600,000 people can expect to have 100,000 appropriate phone numbers.
(The original list represents 1 / 6th of the state's population, so we divide 600K by 6.)
3) Political candidate emails his MOST DEDICATED 2,000 supporters 50 unique phone numbers each. In the e-mail, he would say
"If you could call up these 50 people by (three days before election) and tell them to root for me, that would be great. Oh, and this way, each of us will get a call from one of the supporters. Just act sincere and don't divulge that you are taking part!
Oh, and just as a test, if you don't get a call, please let me know! Finally, if you are gonna be out of town, yada, yada, yada, please reply and let me know."
The trick?
EITHER WOULD WORK: 1) The candidate would make sure to put just ONE supporter's number into someone else's list. OR 2) If he wasn't too busy, he'd just put his cell phone number on each list.**
He would probably do both (48 real voters, 1 supporter, and himself, the latter two randomly scattered but near the bottom
This way, he will know as the deadline approaches, which person has called or not. He will count his many calls he personally got (meaning the number of lists that have gone through, and each list is 48 real people) and know if this is working or not working before the election even starts.
The dozen people who reply that they can't do the list, the politician will call that person's list personally (which is good, too.)
But for the people who never call by (three days before election), he will know by never seeing supporter "Bob'" personal phone number on caller ID. The other way is if supporter "SAMMY", who was on Bob's list, reports to the candidate like instructed and says he wasn't called. The candidate would know sammy was on Bob's list.
The lists that didn't work our or were cancelled early on due to yadayadayada, the politican would call himself (he would still have three days left.)
-
Yes I made this all up, but it is so feasible it's not funny. I could make this text look pretty, but that would take even longer than it did to make this.
If there's a computing project to distribe XBox's private key, then is it really private?
;x
In either case, you don't need the original key. Just get a good locksmithing set. I've never heard of a lock that big though.
All kidding aside however, I've seen a photo of an XBox with the cover off (don't arrest me.) It wasn't gruesome, but it is possible to get inside. What's this hoopla
Yes, the are used. Some recent article listed the popular searches for 2002. It also had a table of popular search engines by queries done a day, in millions. After Google, Yahoo, AOL, MSN, and possibly Lycos, AskJeeves was #6 or so.
This could be because some partner sites automatically query Ask.com. I think each site reported its own statistics. Google was visited the most times each day, with Yahoo near-by (probably for mail and games.)
And, users frequently returned to Google and spent the most time at Google (11 mins I think) other than AOL (15 mins.)
Nobody cares about processing cycles, you aren't coding some game on an Atari system to make a widget go up and down and left and right or reduce flicker. If many clients buy a computer for the purpose of running one type of database software, they won't care if the software takes half the computer processing, be it a '92 system or a 3.18 Ghz system. People want solutions to problems (programming), not fancy shmancy coding.
If you are going to be programming in the real business word, the product is what matters, not how you got there (both to you and the client.) There's a point when CS majors have to step into the real world and actually make things happen, and make things happen NOW, not just theorize about the best and most elegant way to get to point B.
Never mind, he's not a troll.... He just linked the wrong place.
.
You have to go to your local forecast then search for !--
Visual C++ 6.0 would be even more limited without Windows API. At least with VB you could get most everything done.
However, if you needed some occasional API code like you described, then just consult some example code using google.com. It's really easier now than six years ago when I picked up the language!
...which reflects on the programmer, not the language.
nt
All we need is the largest Chip manufacturer, the largest PC manufacturer, and the largest O.S. manufacturer teaming up on things like this. Add NEC, Maxtor, NVidia, and [sic]holy crap snow is falling from the roof around me[/sic] Micron.
Maybe it's not illegal, but it looks bad...
I was just thinking about how much people like you and I are played by this "Western Government". The deal is, I went to my state's web site to try to figure out how to run for Senator, Governor, etc. Yes, maybe I'm not old enough yet, but there was still no information! The best way (only way) right now is to be an intern and watch over some guy who did that too and move up.
What if you're just a simple decent qualified person who wants to run for Selectman/Mayor/Rep/Senator/Governor/President? I went to the Senate's web site, for instance (and many others using google) trying to find out HOW TO RUN! This information is just not on the internet (at least not for my state.)
Just yesterday I thought it would be sweet if there was a web site people could go to to see how to run for political leadership in their state. At least paperwork and deadlines would be greate, but procedures, rules, and regulations in addition, would be excellent!
Seriously, at least 100 million people in the USA are qualified to run for those positions I mentioned (at least by the age rule set in the constitution.)
I want to see competition, I want to see REAL people running! What would REALLY be sweet would be a law by the Senators to make States maintain a web site like I described and one that would also show WHO is running and what they DO and what they have DONE. This would be so sweet. And each candidate would have his own web site hosted (or just linked.) FAIRNESS IN EVERY WAY!
Nobody votes because theres a bunch of bums we don't know anything about who have a gazillion of ties and responsibilities, once in office, to the people who got them there!!!
This would be a pretty cheap way for equal spending that everybody keeps pushing for, good for communicating at least with voters that have access to the internet (the majority.)
That's how the IP thing works! If you use a direct connection to the internet (i.e., no router or WAP to pass through), then the link in my sig should work.... It rolls over the numbers over 256 or 512 etc and uses the remainder.. The end result is an IP that points to slashdot!
5 MILLION!!!!! YEAH!!!!! That's what really matters! And here's to 5 MILLION MORE!
My signature has had the biggest IP of anyone here for months..
No, seriously. :)
;x
My cousin graduated from ### in 2002 for Computer Science. Well, he installs Cat 5 now for a living. (I believe he had a high GPA, too.)
If even he can't get a job, how am I supposed to when I attend a community college for the same field? People aren't getting jobs in Computer Science recently; instead, they are losing jobs. And, it seems that people who are hired (or stay) have to work crazy hours! And the third kicker is that even if he *is* hired, then even he won't be paid more than $30,000 (versus hundreds of thousands in the dot com boom) to start, most likely than not. All this, while doing more work than a programmer previously probably ever had to.
With programming losing its dignity, and the 1% female rate in classes, I'm going NUTS. The hardest part about switching majors is that the other major I've been considering for the past two days is not offered at my school.
I am thinking I could use my love for programming in personal projects while working many weird jobs in the mean time.
That's why I believe the best plan for me will be to resign from ############## and attend the other college.
I guess CS was worth it back when pay and hiring was at a high, but exploring other interests now that the light has shown itself seems like the best idea for me. It used to be that the Visual Arts major I'm thinking about was the interest and CS was a sure thing to fall back on, while now it could sadly be true to think the opposite!!
Let me be the first to say this: CS majors should be ready to fall back on some similar venture or another venture that they would enjoy doing, in case CS doesn't work out!
Forbes talked about their list of 85 world-changing ideas.
:) Why? Because Wi-Fi will do to cell phones what cable/dsl did to land-line dial-up. Man I was just imagining all levels of students using wi-fi tablets in school and that's kind of messed up....
Wi-Fi is coming up, and that will be the biggest world-changing things ever in the future. Imagine always being connected to everybody else in the world who you'd want to be connected to. How screwed up is that?
Oh wait. Cell phones can do that. Damn. Oh well, it doesn't mean I'm going to let this post go waste!
!
A lot of people will now be able to listen to free music anywhere, via internet radio.
:)
There goes the RIAA. Also, this could cause us to lose our hearing of the sounds usually omitted from the tracks during MP3 encoding.
And what about radio waves everywhere? And people instant messsaging each other non-stop?
I know it's kind of scary and weird, but this future could all be possible in under five years. And once we get to wi-fi everywhere, there's no going back! And hackers will be able to DOS my toaster.
I for one, hope this development takes time
Insightful. And Funny. And Interesting. And Well-written. MY props to you! Well done!
here
The newstopic references the original thread where 3drealms announced the source code release.
They have now made a new section just for Source Code Release Discussion:
Full source release under the GPL? Yes! This is unprecedented for Apogee! I suppose this is the second xmas gift we've been waiting for since last year? I think I'll be opening a new section on my website now for this source code, and maybe host modifications.
Probably the first order of business here is to strip out the old audio library and other unneeded/Watcom-only portions, then try to port this thing over so it will compile in Visual Studio. Also looks like there are a few assembly files that need to be eliminated or converted to C, but not too many.
Lets get moving!
- Lon Matero
http://www.apogeegames.com
And you thought it would never happen...
Today we're doing something I bet most everyone out there thought we'd never do. No, it's not Duke Nukem Forever, but something some folks on the net have been asking us to do for ages. Today we're releasing the source code to Rise of the Triad! The source is being released under the GPL license, and we still retain copyright on the game (plus we still sell Rise of the Triad), but folks have been asking for something like this for a long time, and here it is.
We are dedicating the release of the Rise of the Triad Source code to our late friend and Rise of the Triad programmer William Scarboro, who died tragically back in early August of 2002. I'm sure if he were still with us, William would be happy to see this out there, and see what folks might do with the code.
In the archive are some thoughts about Rise of the Triad by Tom Hall (the game's producer), and Scott Miller (Apogee/3DR CEO/Founder). You can check out the readme here before downloading the entire archive. In addition to this file, we have several other ROTT related downlods available - check out our ROTT page for the full list.
The folks reading this who aren't programmers probably won't have any interest in this, but those who are programmers might want to check it out. You can download the file (which is roughly 4Mb zipped) here:
ftp://ftp.3drealms.com/source/rottsource.zip
Enjoy! Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone. See ya next year!