He doesn't pretend to be qualified to tell us about God. Any comments he makes are to satisfy the great majority of lamers who reject science because their church tells them to. Why does Contact come to mind?
I've *seen* people playing 6D 3x3 noughts and crosses. (what you yanks call tic-tac-toe). Each game used a lot of paper.
I think the objective was to get as many lines as possible (in 3D, the first player can force a line easily, so I imagine it would be even easier in 6D).
To stay on topic -- if you were falling into a black hole, you would need something like this to pass the infinite time that would need to go by before you were crushed
Off course what everyone wants is a GUT (grand unified theory) that works. GR appears to be compatible with some string theories (although they also require SUSY
I've got it ! Just use DEBIAN instead and we will solve the world!
When I read this story, I thought "oh yes, a decent question about conflict of work interests". Then I read all the posts, expecting to find something worthwhile, and there is all this rubbish from people saying "GPL is GPL"
Duh, of course it is. The point is that this guy is working for a company. If you've ever worked for a company trying to make a profit, you will know that they are not about to pay their programmers high wages and then give away their code for free. Also, it is a safe bet that it's written into this guy's contract that code he writes becomes copywritten and intellectual property of the employer -- making it a breach of contract for him to add the code to his GPL project and distribute it separately.
The question is what should he do about it? Wake up people, this is the real world, not some fantasy where a company gives away its work for nothing. In fact, this guy's job depends on his company owning software and selling it expensively.
Having made this point, now for my advice to the guy. Firstly, you can't expect someone to pay you for developing your own GPL product (which is what would happen if you did the work for the company and then added the code to your own project). You should sit down with your employer, explain GPL and its importance if he doesnt know already, and make the point that he got the original software for free and without paying -- and then level your proposed solution at him.
I was going to suggest that the employer allows you to write the code on the GPL project, and then you license him a special version which will then be non-GPL that he can use/sell/etc. However this violates GPL and others who have developed the project may complain.
There seems to be a deeper issue here -- the fact that GPL code must remain forever free and open source, but people will want to sell software using GPL libraries etc. It seems a waste to have to reinvent the wheel just because you are a business, rather than a freelance geek who can afford the OSS ideology.
So tell your employer that what he suggests is a violation of the licence agreement he agreed to when the code was installed (BTW, where are you sophists now who will claim that the employer can do whatever he wants because he accidentally circumvented reading the GPL?).
Maybe you can reach an agreement where you will have rights to the code you write on this project, and let someone else sue him if he insists.. I have run out of ideas:)
(Hopefully you other readers will have some) </RAMBLE>
When you refresh a page, it will reload the page text - but use cache for items on a page (pictures etc.)
To reload the whole page, hold down Ctrl as you click Refresh (alternatively, press Ctrl-F5).
Admittedly I only found this out when someone told me. I will agree with you that MSIE and other MS apps have a shortage of built-in documentation, and a lack of options for advanced users to configure.
(Note - this is not to be confused with the Windows API, which is superbly documented, as is MSIE customisation and extensions for programmers. It's a beautiful environment for programmers, but not so for end-users of MSIE who want to configure options and know how to do non-trivial things.)
Because you don't understand how MSIE stores cookies, you call it lame?
Are you telling me you've never encountered some problem on your Linux machine and not immediately known how to solve it?
What's even worse, you seem to blame IE because Slashdot's server has put invalid information in its cookie that is making the server's output stuff up. The browser isn't broken at all - if you had bothered to check the page source, you would have seen that it is displaying things exactly as they were being sent from Slashdot's server.
FYI - to delete cookies, first close MSIE. Then delete the cookie file for the site you want, from the cookies directory. Then reopen MSIE.
Innovative doesn't just mean inventing a new product genre from scratch. Of course there were word processors around before MS came about! MS just went and made a word processor that was innovative in that it was flexible and easy to use for the average user (not to mention having powerful features for advanced users). How many word processors allow you to control their behaviour with script language code (VBA), and display, modify and control the document from another application (OLE Automation) , and embed documents within your own applications? (OLE)
If you are going to say that Windows was "stolen/copied", then you have to admit that Linux was stolen/copied from Unix, BSD was stolen/copied from SCO, etc. etc. The innovation is that the "stealer/copiers" took an existing product and greatly enhanced it.
To make the rest of the world realise that MS isn't that great, in a sane and un-ranty way? You will have to come up with something better.
Not only will it put a dent in the net worth of every company in Redmond -- it will put a dent in the net worth of every technology company in America. MS carries the technology sharemarket with it, whether you like that or not. Just look at what the Nasdaq has done since Jackson's report damning MS was released.
It's lucky for us that the Slashdot owners are having some ethics here, rather than just playing for their share price and taking MS's side.
The server market always used to be owned by fat Unix systems. Recently, Linux and Windows NT have been cutting into that. MS was never anywhere near owning it.
In fact - how can MS have a copyright on any of their Windows code? It's just the output of Visual C++. What's more, Linus didn't even write the Linux kernel, vi did. Vi isnt gonna defend itself in court (and if it tried, nobody would understand;) ), so I guess that's the end of GPL.
The first, second and fourth of these are obviously true.
People really love him, and will rally to his cause before letting the government hurt MS.
I'm waiting for share traders -- if not the Government itself -- to decide that they are shooting themselves in the foot. The Nasdaq , along with most of MS's big competition, has fallen immensely since Jackson's findings. Red Hat and Corel stock value has fallen by 60%, to give but one example. The fact that the Government can intervene in a free market and attempt to cripple a company merely for being successful, has scared the investors (as well it should). MS hasn't done anything that Sun, IBM, etc. haven't done, and why would an investor put big money in a company when there is the threat hanging over his head that the Government will rip out his stock's value as soon as it gets large enough?
It's time that people woke up and saw MS as the great driver of the computing industry that it is. How low will the Nasdaq have to go before people realize?
Re:chess is not that hard, Go is
on
Solving Chess?
·
· Score: 2
But for example, checking the victory condition is easy (can the king move). In fact there is more to it than that:
Can the king move? Is the king in check? Can the checking piece be captured? Can a piece be interposed to block the check?
none of which are trivial, apart from perhaps the second.
Now, take the game of Go... it's much harder to figure out the victory condition Not only is it difficult to spot that the game is over, it is diffuclt to see who won. However, human players quickly build up an intuition for what style of position is a win, and they do not need to play onto the end. This intuition is extremely difficult to implement in a computer. (beyond current techniques?)
A different way of tackling this problem would be to start from the end and work backwards. How many legal board positions are there? It is certainly less than 13^64 (13 possibilities for a square, 64 squares) - much less than the 35^100 someone suggested. I am assuming the same position will not be reached twice (if it were then we could cut out that section and still have the perfect game). [Note for experts: I ignore the (relatively rare in this context) cases where the same board position has different move possibilities, and the case of draw by repetition). I am sure that this 13^64 can be quickly reduced (eg. by noting there must be at least 32 blank squares) - but I will not do that here.
One could begin to assemble a tree backwards, by finding each legal position and linking it to ones that come after and before, until eventually the initial position were reached.
This of course does not escape the storage problem.. one figure i will quote is that a database exists for all possible games where it is down to 5 pieces total or fewer - this takes up 20gb of storage.
One also may be able to "classify" a large number of positions, and maybe even to create a hash that will identify classes of positions which all have the same assessment - this would alleviate the storage problem.
As to the result of the perfect game? Going by my chess experience, I would wager my life savings that it is a draw. There are just SO MANY final positions which are drawn due to lack of material. I cannot believe that white can force a win from the initial position, and i am certain that black cannot. An evenly matched game can only have an even result. The "best" game would have no clever sacrifices or traps, because the "best" line for the other player would preclude this. In fact, i think the "best" game would be exceedingly boring - and players would not play it exactly for this reason!
Slashdot Mirror
He doesn't pretend to be qualified to tell us about God. Any comments he makes are to satisfy the great majority of lamers who reject science because their church tells them to.
Why does Contact come to mind?
If you have good reasons to think that God is unknowable, it seems reasonable that you would assert that (as agnostics may well do).
:)
You're a weak atheist? Eat more weetbix in the morning
I've *seen* people playing 6D 3x3 noughts and crosses. (what you yanks call tic-tac-toe). Each game used a lot of paper.
I think the objective was to get as many lines as possible (in 3D, the first player can force a line easily, so I imagine it would be even easier in 6D).
To stay on topic -- if you were falling into a black hole, you would need something like this to pass the infinite time that would need to go by before you were crushed
Off course what everyone wants is a GUT (grand unified theory) that works. GR appears to be compatible with some string theories (although they also require SUSY
I've got it ! Just use DEBIAN instead and we will solve the world!
Saying GR overthrew Newton is like saying the Pentium overthrew the 486.
GR makes the calcuations a whole lot harder, with negligible practical difference except in extreme situations (high speeds or high gravity).
A wormhole is a black hole which you fall into and re-emerges somewhere else in space before you could reach its singularity. (to use layman's terms)
Still a black hole.
When I read this story, I thought "oh yes, a decent question about conflict of work interests". Then I read all the posts, expecting to find something worthwhile, and there is all this rubbish from people saying "GPL is GPL"
:)
Duh, of course it is. The point is that this guy is working for a company. If you've ever worked for a company trying to make a profit, you will know that they are not about to pay their programmers high wages and then give away their code for free. Also, it is a safe bet that it's written into this guy's contract that code he writes becomes copywritten and intellectual property of the employer -- making it a breach of contract for him to add the code to his GPL project and distribute it separately.
The question is what should he do about it?
Wake up people, this is the real world, not some fantasy where a company gives away its work for nothing. In fact, this guy's job depends on his company owning software and selling it expensively.
Having made this point, now for my advice to the guy. Firstly, you can't expect someone to pay you for developing your own GPL product (which is what would happen if you did the work for the company and then added the code to your own project). You should sit down with your employer, explain GPL and its importance if he doesnt know already, and make the point that he got the original software for free and without paying -- and then level your proposed solution at him.
I was going to suggest that the employer allows you to write the code on the GPL project, and then you license him a special version which will then be non-GPL that he can use/sell/etc. However this violates GPL and others who have developed the project may complain.
There seems to be a deeper issue here -- the fact that GPL code must remain forever free and open source, but people will want to sell software using GPL libraries etc. It seems a waste to have to reinvent the wheel just because you are a business, rather than a freelance geek who can afford the OSS ideology.
So tell your employer that what he suggests is a violation of the licence agreement he agreed to when the code was installed (BTW, where are you sophists now who will claim that the employer can do whatever he wants because he accidentally circumvented reading the GPL?).
Maybe you can reach an agreement where you will have rights to the code you write on this project, and let someone else sue him if he insists.. I have run out of ideas
(Hopefully you other readers will have some)
</RAMBLE>
When you refresh a page, it will reload the page text - but use cache for items on a page (pictures etc.)
To reload the whole page, hold down Ctrl as you click Refresh (alternatively, press Ctrl-F5).
Admittedly I only found this out when someone told me. I will agree with you that MSIE and other MS apps have a shortage of built-in documentation, and a lack of options for advanced users to configure.
(Note - this is not to be confused with the Windows API, which is superbly documented, as is MSIE customisation and extensions for programmers. It's a beautiful environment for programmers, but not so for end-users of MSIE who want to configure options and know how to do non-trivial things.)
This kind of FUD is typical of Slashdot posters.
Because you don't understand how MSIE stores cookies, you call it lame?
Are you telling me you've never encountered some problem on your Linux machine and not immediately known how to solve it?
What's even worse, you seem to blame IE because Slashdot's server has put invalid information in its cookie that is making the server's output stuff up.
The browser isn't broken at all - if you had bothered to check the page source, you would have seen that it is displaying things exactly as they were being sent from Slashdot's server.
FYI - to delete cookies, first close MSIE. Then delete the cookie file for the site you want, from the cookies directory. Then reopen MSIE.
Innovative doesn't just mean inventing a new product genre from scratch.
Of course there were word processors around before MS came about! MS just went and made a word processor that was innovative in that it was flexible and easy to use for the average user (not to mention having powerful features for advanced users). How many word processors allow you to control their behaviour with script language code (VBA), and display, modify and control the document from another application (OLE Automation) , and embed documents within your own applications? (OLE)
If you are going to say that Windows was "stolen/copied", then you have to admit that Linux was stolen/copied from Unix, BSD was stolen/copied from SCO, etc. etc.
The innovation is that the "stealer/copiers" took an existing product and greatly enhanced it.
To make the rest of the world realise that MS isn't that great, in a sane and un-ranty way? You will have to come up with something better.
It's lucky for us that the Slashdot owners are having some ethics here, rather than just playing for their share price and taking MS's side.
I guess Slashdot should 'and over their domain ownership to a better provider :D
I think it'd be pretty easy to write a bot in php that scums for first post. In fact, I might just do that
Next thing you'll be telling me that I have a choice between Windows, Linux, BSD, etc.
Silly me.
The Halloween documents were written by ESR in an attempt to discredit Microsoft.
Have the Halloween documents been cited in the MS vs DOJ court case?
The server market always used to be owned by fat Unix systems. Recently, Linux and Windows NT have been cutting into that. MS was never anywhere near owning it.
Oh no!
Downloading from MS's website causes outbound traffic on port 80!
I think I just felt the Earth's foundations shake..
Great idea!
;) ), so I guess that's the end of GPL.
In fact - how can MS have a copyright on any of their Windows code? It's just the output of Visual C++.
What's more, Linus didn't even write the Linux kernel, vi did. Vi isnt gonna defend itself in court (and if it tried, nobody would understand
Thanks for pointing this out!
How is that a loophole? IE (5.0) just gives me the usual 'page not found'. Maybe it breaks Nutscrape or something?
People really love him, and will rally to his cause before letting the government hurt MS.
I'm waiting for share traders -- if not the Government itself -- to decide that they are shooting themselves in the foot. The Nasdaq , along with most of MS's big competition, has fallen immensely since Jackson's findings. Red Hat and Corel stock value has fallen by 60%, to give but one example. The fact that the Government can intervene in a free market and attempt to cripple a company merely for being successful, has scared the investors (as well it should). MS hasn't done anything that Sun, IBM, etc. haven't done, and why would an investor put big money in a company when there is the threat hanging over his head that the Government will rip out his stock's value as soon as it gets large enough?
It's time that people woke up and saw MS as the great driver of the computing industry that it is. How low will the Nasdaq have to go before people realize?
I wanna know where you live! It's $100 for a good root around here.
That's better
Well, SQL Server is easily the fastest RDBMS out there (ye s, much faster than Oracle 8i and MySQL</A>), as well as being far cheaper than Oracle.
Why do people use Oracle+NT ?
But for example, checking the victory condition is easy (can the king move).
In fact there is more to it than that:
Can the king move?
Is the king in check?
Can the checking piece be captured?
Can a piece be interposed to block the check?
none of which are trivial, apart from perhaps the second.
Now, take the game of Go... it's much harder to figure out the victory condition
Not only is it difficult to spot that the game is over, it is diffuclt to see who won.
However, human players quickly build up an intuition for what style of position is a win, and they do not need to play onto the end. This intuition is extremely difficult to implement in a computer. (beyond current techniques?)
A different way of tackling this problem would be to start from the end and work backwards. How many legal board positions are there? It is certainly less than 13^64 (13 possibilities for a square, 64 squares) - much less than the 35^100 someone suggested.
I am assuming the same position will not be reached twice (if it were then we could cut out that section and still have the perfect game).
[Note for experts: I ignore the (relatively rare in this context) cases where the same board position has different move possibilities, and the case of draw by repetition).
I am sure that this 13^64 can be quickly reduced (eg. by noting there must be at least 32 blank squares) - but I will not do that here.
One could begin to assemble a tree backwards, by finding each legal position and linking it to ones that come after and before, until eventually the initial position were reached.
This of course does not escape the storage problem.. one figure i will quote is that a database exists for all possible games where it is down to 5 pieces total or fewer - this takes up 20gb of storage.
One also may be able to "classify" a large number of positions, and maybe even to create a hash that will identify classes of positions which all have the same assessment - this would alleviate the storage problem.
As to the result of the perfect game? Going by my chess experience, I would wager my life savings that it is a draw. There are just SO MANY final positions which are drawn due to lack of material. I cannot believe that white can force a win from the initial position, and i am certain that black cannot. An evenly matched game can only have an even result. The "best" game would have no clever sacrifices or traps, because the "best" line for the other player would preclude this. In fact, i think the "best" game would be exceedingly boring - and players would not play it exactly for this reason!