I know that poker is played with a 52 card deck. What I meant is that these is no need to simulate 5 decks worth of cards, since the computer can radomly draw cards as if you had an infinite number of decks shuffled into one gigantic never ending pile.
You still seem confused. Every hand in poker is played with a single deck; there are no 5 decks of cards like in blackjack. Take 52 cards, shuffle, deal the hand, repeat. That's it.
The game of Poker will never be open to all audiences. It is a game aimed at RICH adults, limiting the potential audience
Huh? It's not like the only games have $10,000 buyins.
There is a real scientific aspect to Chess that Poker does not have.
Absolutely wrong. Poker is a textbook example of game theory, and because of imperfect information, it's arguably more strategically complex than chess. In chess, "all" you have to do is look ahead N moves and pick the best one. Sure, it gets complicated because you need to have a good way of evaluating positions and pruning moves that you know are bad, but at the core it's just a static decision tree. In poker you have to consider what your opponent has, what he thinks you have, what he thinks you think he has, etc, etc.
Poker is strictly about winning money.
Poker is about winning chips. Those chips are often converted to money, but don't have to be.
Let's face it, there's NO tangible benefit to using Objective-C.
Dynamic messaging. Real class methods. Categories. Simple introspection. Method syntax that many prefer. Come on, you may not like ObjC but to claim it has "no tangible benefits" is ludicrous.
Suppose Apple were to create a new fork of WINE to run natively in the Aqua environment, and pour a whole bunch of development time into tweaking and improving it
Then hardly any developers bother with Mac specific versions, because the Windows versions will be "good enough" to use on OS X. OS/2 tried this strategy, and it failed spectacularly.
Because on a Mac, you can be guaranteed of the existence of preinstalled libraries, and on Linux you can't. I agree the Mac way is much better, but until there's a ubiquitous Linux standard it's not going to be feasible there.
t's not that Apple has magically figured out which packages make most real-worlddevelopers happy, it's that Apple's developer and user community has become reduced to a group of people that happen to be happy with very little.
Yeah, just those irrelevant toy applications like Office and Photoshop. Come on.
Please tell me you're a troll. Otherwise this is a perfect example of being so open-minded that your brain falls out.
America has the worst human rights track record in the developed world, so China with its censorship isnt really anything new from the point of view of an American. Right now the American internet is censored to protect corporations
Apple would be idiotic not to include something akin to VirtualPC - or maybe even more like VMWare - on these new macs, to let them run windows at near-native speeds on top of OS X
Thereby removing any incentive for developers to target OS X. See OS/2. The bad thing is, this will happen whether Apple supports it or not.
If this were a hoax, Apple would have denied this report rather than simply refused to comment
Apple always refuses to comment on rumors.
I think Apple's incentive to do this is to give themselves a way to bow out of the desktop and server market in a gradual way without taking an instant hit to their revenues.
First, why on earth would Apple want to exit their very profitable hardware business? Second, there is no "gradual" way. If they announce that they're switching to x86 over the next few years, sales of PPC Macs instantly go to nearly zero. Nobody's going to buy a $2500 machine knowing that the architecture is a dead end.
Even by December, when the XBOX360 comes out, the CPU power of the desktops won't come close to XBOX's 3 3.2Ghz G5 chips
Yes they will. The Xbox doesn't have G5s, it has lightweight 64-bit PPCs very similar to the primary CPU in the Cell. They're less efficient per-cycle than G5s because they have fewer execution units and out-of-order capabilities. A dual 2.7 G5 Mac should easily be in the same ballpark in terms of CPU power, as should high end Opterons and P4s. (Granted, they're much more expensive, but then they do a lot more).
If that is in fact the goal then it wouldn't follow that overthrowing a secular government and a non-fundamentalist leader would be a step towards the goal.
Iraq wasn't an ideal choice, but it was the only available one. The article I linked notes this; Iraq was the only nation that was actively hostile towards us (as opposed to the covert hostility of other nations who support terrorist groups), and geographically it's an excellent location to exert influence on others.
The rise in militancy is good evidence that the strategy for meeting this alleged goal is not working and in fact moving things in the wrong direction.
On the other hand, the elections are evidence that it is working, as are events in Libya and Lebanon. It's still too early to tell.
I hope they also want to reform the West by eliminating fundamentalist Christicanity as a viable worldview
Fundamentalist Christianity *has* been eliminated as a viable worldview. That doesn't mean there are no Christians, it means there is no serious support for a worldwide Christian theocracy. The worst the religious right does here is delay gay marriage for a few years and make themselves look like idiots by putting stickers on biology books. Meanwhile in the Middle East imams on government-run TV stations call for extermination of the Jews and a global Caliphate. The Western world had an Enlightenment; the Islamic world needs the same. Not (just) for humanitarian reasons, but because we can't tolerate millions of people with 8th century morality running around with 21st century weapons.
Funny how the administration stopped talking about finding the weapons eh? They even had the balls to say oh well NOW its about FREEDOM.
It's not and never was about either. It's about reforming the Middle East by eliminating fundamentalist Islam as a viable worldview, which nobody in the government can officially say for obvious reasons. See here.
Bush even said that if he knew Iraq had no weapons he would have invaded anyway.
Exactly, although I'm actually surprised he admitted that.
In my estimation, Apple's future looks tenuous. Microsoft supporting Office for Macs is a courtesy, seemingly, because I can't imagine that the cost of doing so is worth it to Microsoft.
Microsoft's Mac Business Unit is one of their most profitable divisions. Furthermore, I'm pretty sure there's some mutual blackmail going on: Apple wants MS to continue to support Mac Office, and MS doesn't want Apple to release OS X for x86.
If it was not for the corporate types, that have enslaved humainty to warehouses and 40 hour work weeks, maybe people would be happier working in their garden, taking time to enjoy the warmth of the sun, or take a dip in a lake. It does not take money to do the things that make for happiness.
Nobody's stopping you, go for it. Although I suspect after a few weeks you'd discover you really do like the manifestations of evil corporate power like computers and air conditioning.
Dr. Evil: And we expect that this (air quotes) "DRM" will produce increased revenue of...(pinky to mouth) ONE MILLION DOLLARS. Number Two: But Dr. Evil, it will cost twice that much develop and implement. And our market research shows that we could make billions more if we were to focus on increasing the quality of our music. Dr. Evil: Why make billions when we could make...millions?
Re:The article sounded reasonable until:
on
A Gamer's Manifesto
·
· Score: 1
Glad I wasn't the only one whose BS detector went off. The idea that 3 3.2GHz PPCs aren't sufficient to have moderately intelligent AI because of the details of instruction scheduling is ludicrous on its face. I don't care how inefficient per-cycle they are, at some point the megahertz myth is no longer a myth.
I say it's because they operate under corpitalism - government rules that favor otherwise unsustainable business models of big corporations - rather than true capitalist open market.
Heh, good neologism. And you're absolutely right; real capitalism tends drives prices to marginal costs, which for software is effectively zero.
Tell that to the 95% of iPod users who don't even know what DRM is and ripped with the default settings.
Cartman, what the hell are you talking about? If you rip a CD with iTunes, you get unencumbered MP3 or AAC files. I don't know of a way you could make them have DRM even if you wanted to.
Apparently for some people, the tactile (feel of the paper & book), auditory (sound of the pages turning) and olfactory (smell of the book) senses are all part of the "reading experience"
There are plenty of left-brain reasons to prefer real books. As you mentioned there's the display; paper still has a much higher resolution than LCDs. And suppose I need to refresh my memory about something that happened 50 pages back; easy with a book, probably not with an electronic reader. Yeah, you can have bookmarks and search capabilities, but it's very hard to do that with a good user interface, especially if the user is lying in bed and doesn't want to mess with keyboards or other complex input devices.
So you say that the workers' jobs are to provide profits for the owners of the company.
Um, yes. If a worker doesn't provide a profit to the company, why on earth should they hire him? As an act of charity? Aren't there more deserving recipients of altruism than temporarily unemployed programmers?
maybe people who have worked hard to make the company run feel some sort of entitlement afterward and think that their needs are more important than the future profitability of the company
Lots of people feel entitled to lots of things; it doesn't mean they actually are. Why do you think you should be able to force a company to continue to pay you if you can't produce anything of equal or greater value for them?
I think anyone who works at a company and then just passively accepts that they can be discarded inconsequentially is crazy.
There would be large consequences if my company were to discard me. That's because I'm fairly good at what I do and have acquired lots of specialized knowledge, and as a result it would be very expensive to replace me. If your employer really can get rid of you and not suffer any consequences, then you should be immensely thankful that they haven't figured that out yet, and should look into ways of making yourself useful.
I'm not saying that cutting a bunch of jobs is as bad as dumping waste into a river. I'm just saying I do think there are similarities as far as costs to society.
And I'm saying that's silly. Look, IBM has (rightly or wrongly) determined that certain employees are not producing sufficient revenues to justify their salaries. If IBM continues to pay these people (at their current salaries), they are engaging in charity. And if it's your view that they are ethically required to be charitable, why should the recipients of this charity be upper-middle class IT workers? Why not starving peasants in Africa?
Severing a voluntary relationship that is no longer mutually beneficial is hugely different from actively damaging public property. I find it baffling that anybody can make that comparison.
Imagine if Apple adopted the Cell processor, with its PowerPC core and massive parallelism via SPEs. AltiVec, for example, could be emulated on the SPEs
No need; the PPE supports Altivec directly. I agree that Apple could get a lot of leverage out of the Cell. Look at the CoreImage API for example; it dynamically determines whether code should execute on the CPU or GPU depending on what hardware you have. It would be entirely possible for Apple to add support to CoreImage for Cell SPEs, which wouldn't require any application-level code changes at all.
Slashdot Mirror
I know that poker is played with a 52 card deck. What I meant is that these is no need to simulate 5 decks worth of cards, since the computer can radomly draw cards as if you had an infinite number of decks shuffled into one gigantic never ending pile.
You still seem confused. Every hand in poker is played with a single deck; there are no 5 decks of cards like in blackjack. Take 52 cards, shuffle, deal the hand, repeat. That's it.
The game of Poker will never be open to all audiences. It is a game aimed at RICH adults, limiting the potential audience
Huh? It's not like the only games have $10,000 buyins.
There is a real scientific aspect to Chess that Poker does not have.
Absolutely wrong. Poker is a textbook example of game theory, and because of imperfect information, it's arguably more strategically complex than chess. In chess, "all" you have to do is look ahead N moves and pick the best one. Sure, it gets complicated because you need to have a good way of evaluating positions and pruning moves that you know are bad, but at the core it's just a static decision tree. In poker you have to consider what your opponent has, what he thinks you have, what he thinks you think he has, etc, etc.
Poker is strictly about winning money.
Poker is about winning chips. Those chips are often converted to money, but don't have to be.
Let's face it, there's NO tangible benefit to using Objective-C.
Dynamic messaging. Real class methods. Categories. Simple introspection. Method syntax that many prefer. Come on, you may not like ObjC but to claim it has "no tangible benefits" is ludicrous.
Suppose Apple were to create a new fork of WINE to run natively in the Aqua environment, and pour a whole bunch of development time into tweaking and improving it
Then hardly any developers bother with Mac specific versions, because the Windows versions will be "good enough" to use on OS X. OS/2 tried this strategy, and it failed spectacularly.
why NOT use OS X's approach on Linux?
Because on a Mac, you can be guaranteed of the existence of preinstalled libraries, and on Linux you can't. I agree the Mac way is much better, but until there's a ubiquitous Linux standard it's not going to be feasible there.
t's not that Apple has magically figured out which packages make most real-worlddevelopers happy, it's that Apple's developer and user community has become reduced to a group of people that happen to be happy with very little.
Yeah, just those irrelevant toy applications like Office and Photoshop. Come on.
Please tell me you're a troll. Otherwise this is a perfect example of being so open-minded that your brain falls out.
America has the worst human rights track record in the developed world, so China with its censorship isnt really anything new from the point of view of an American. Right now the American internet is censored to protect corporations
This is, of course, total bullshit.
Apple would be idiotic not to include something akin to VirtualPC - or maybe even more like VMWare - on these new macs, to let them run windows at near-native speeds on top of OS X
Thereby removing any incentive for developers to target OS X. See OS/2. The bad thing is, this will happen whether Apple supports it or not.
If this were a hoax, Apple would have denied this report rather than simply refused to comment
Apple always refuses to comment on rumors.
I think Apple's incentive to do this is to give themselves a way to bow out of the desktop and server market in a gradual way without taking an instant hit to their revenues.
First, why on earth would Apple want to exit their very profitable hardware business? Second, there is no "gradual" way. If they announce that they're switching to x86 over the next few years, sales of PPC Macs instantly go to nearly zero. Nobody's going to buy a $2500 machine knowing that the architecture is a dead end.
Even by December, when the XBOX360 comes out, the CPU power of the desktops won't come close to XBOX's 3 3.2Ghz G5 chips
Yes they will. The Xbox doesn't have G5s, it has lightweight 64-bit PPCs very similar to the primary CPU in the Cell. They're less efficient per-cycle than G5s because they have fewer execution units and out-of-order capabilities. A dual 2.7 G5 Mac should easily be in the same ballpark in terms of CPU power, as should high end Opterons and P4s. (Granted, they're much more expensive, but then they do a lot more).
If that is in fact the goal then it wouldn't follow that overthrowing a secular government and a non-fundamentalist leader would be a step towards the goal.
Iraq wasn't an ideal choice, but it was the only available one. The article I linked notes this; Iraq was the only nation that was actively hostile towards us (as opposed to the covert hostility of other nations who support terrorist groups), and geographically it's an excellent location to exert influence on others.
The rise in militancy is good evidence that the strategy for meeting this alleged goal is not working and in fact moving things in the wrong direction.
On the other hand, the elections are evidence that it is working, as are events in Libya and Lebanon. It's still too early to tell.
I hope they also want to reform the West by eliminating fundamentalist Christicanity as a viable worldview
Fundamentalist Christianity *has* been eliminated as a viable worldview. That doesn't mean there are no Christians, it means there is no serious support for a worldwide Christian theocracy. The worst the religious right does here is delay gay marriage for a few years and make themselves look like idiots by putting stickers on biology books. Meanwhile in the Middle East imams on government-run TV stations call for extermination of the Jews and a global Caliphate. The Western world had an Enlightenment; the Islamic world needs the same. Not (just) for humanitarian reasons, but because we can't tolerate millions of people with 8th century morality running around with 21st century weapons.
Funny how the administration stopped talking about finding the weapons eh? They even had the balls to say oh well NOW its about FREEDOM.
It's not and never was about either. It's about reforming the Middle East by eliminating fundamentalist Islam as a viable worldview, which nobody in the government can officially say for obvious reasons. See here.
Bush even said that if he knew Iraq had no weapons he would have invaded anyway.
Exactly, although I'm actually surprised he admitted that.
In my estimation, Apple's future looks tenuous. Microsoft supporting Office for Macs is a courtesy, seemingly, because I can't imagine that the cost of doing so is worth it to Microsoft.
Microsoft's Mac Business Unit is one of their most profitable divisions. Furthermore, I'm pretty sure there's some mutual blackmail going on: Apple wants MS to continue to support Mac Office, and MS doesn't want Apple to release OS X for x86.
Seriously! FUCK ALL YOU PEOPLE!
For future reference, this may not be the best tone to take when attempting to convince others that you're psychologically normal.
If it was not for the corporate types, that have enslaved humainty to warehouses and 40 hour work weeks, maybe people would be happier working in their garden, taking time to enjoy the warmth of the sun, or take a dip in a lake. It does not take money to do the things that make for happiness.
Nobody's stopping you, go for it. Although I suspect after a few weeks you'd discover you really do like the manifestations of evil corporate power like computers and air conditioning.
Heh. That works pretty well:
Dr. Evil: And we expect that this (air quotes) "DRM" will produce increased revenue of...(pinky to mouth) ONE MILLION DOLLARS.
Number Two: But Dr. Evil, it will cost twice that much develop and implement. And our market research shows that we could make billions more if we were to focus on increasing the quality of our music.
Dr. Evil: Why make billions when we could make...millions?
Glad I wasn't the only one whose BS detector went off. The idea that 3 3.2GHz PPCs aren't sufficient to have moderately intelligent AI because of the details of instruction scheduling is ludicrous on its face. I don't care how inefficient per-cycle they are, at some point the megahertz myth is no longer a myth.
I say it's because they operate under corpitalism - government rules that favor otherwise unsustainable business models of big corporations - rather than true capitalist open market.
Heh, good neologism. And you're absolutely right; real capitalism tends drives prices to marginal costs, which for software is effectively zero.
Tell that to the 95% of iPod users who don't even know what DRM is and ripped with the default settings.
Cartman, what the hell are you talking about? If you rip a CD with iTunes, you get unencumbered MP3 or AAC files. I don't know of a way you could make them have DRM even if you wanted to.
Apparently for some people, the tactile (feel of the paper & book), auditory (sound of the pages turning) and olfactory (smell of the book) senses are all part of the "reading experience"
There are plenty of left-brain reasons to prefer real books. As you mentioned there's the display; paper still has a much higher resolution than LCDs. And suppose I need to refresh my memory about something that happened 50 pages back; easy with a book, probably not with an electronic reader. Yeah, you can have bookmarks and search capabilities, but it's very hard to do that with a good user interface, especially if the user is lying in bed and doesn't want to mess with keyboards or other complex input devices.
So you say that the workers' jobs are to provide profits for the owners of the company.
Um, yes. If a worker doesn't provide a profit to the company, why on earth should they hire him? As an act of charity? Aren't there more deserving recipients of altruism than temporarily unemployed programmers?
maybe people who have worked hard to make the company run feel some sort of entitlement afterward and think that their needs are more important than the future profitability of the company
Lots of people feel entitled to lots of things; it doesn't mean they actually are. Why do you think you should be able to force a company to continue to pay you if you can't produce anything of equal or greater value for them?
I think anyone who works at a company and then just passively accepts that they can be discarded inconsequentially is crazy.
There would be large consequences if my company were to discard me. That's because I'm fairly good at what I do and have acquired lots of specialized knowledge, and as a result it would be very expensive to replace me. If your employer really can get rid of you and not suffer any consequences, then you should be immensely thankful that they haven't figured that out yet, and should look into ways of making yourself useful.
I'm not saying that cutting a bunch of jobs is as bad as dumping waste into a river. I'm just saying I do think there are similarities as far as costs to society.
And I'm saying that's silly. Look, IBM has (rightly or wrongly) determined that certain employees are not producing sufficient revenues to justify their salaries. If IBM continues to pay these people (at their current salaries), they are engaging in charity. And if it's your view that they are ethically required to be charitable, why should the recipients of this charity be upper-middle class IT workers? Why not starving peasants in Africa?
Severing a voluntary relationship that is no longer mutually beneficial is hugely different from actively damaging public property. I find it baffling that anybody can make that comparison.
Of course, but keep it quiet. We might as well enjoy the AAPL runup :)
You can copy the brain but you can't copy consciousness. For one, you don't know what it is. Until you do, you're up shit creek.
/usr/bin/gcc ./gcc_copy".
You don't need to know exactly how something works in order to duplicate it. Example: "cp
And when you find out what it is, you'll realize that it can be neither copied, nor created, nor destroyed.
And your scientific basis for this is?
Imagine if Apple adopted the Cell processor, with its PowerPC core and massive parallelism via SPEs. AltiVec, for example, could be emulated on the SPEs
No need; the PPE supports Altivec directly. I agree that Apple could get a lot of leverage out of the Cell. Look at the CoreImage API for example; it dynamically determines whether code should execute on the CPU or GPU depending on what hardware you have. It would be entirely possible for Apple to add support to CoreImage for Cell SPEs, which wouldn't require any application-level code changes at all.