Geez, a little hard on this post, aren't you?
I've had jobs adminning Windows computers where I did 12-13 systems of admin and I still had time to do all the accounting and train people on the use of equipment.
Managing 10 systems is nearly trivial unless you've got a bunch of idiots using them. I'd much rather admin Linux systems because that's more fun, but I don't buy that a good admin can do 10x as many Linux boxes. More probably, but not 10x.
Yeah, but lets say I, who have no professional tournament experience, was going to play Mr. Kasparov.
Now, I've got probably 10-15 books which feature most of his significant games. He probably doesn't have access to ANY of my games. But if I went out and beat him cold in a tournament, would it be any less impressive? If I did would everyone be arguing I should have been forced to forget all those games before the match to "keep it fair"?
Besides which, that database of prior games was more useful as a psych-out tool than an actual game tool. Nowhere in DB's list of games did he ever run into GK opening with the Caro-Kann or any of other openings he used (at least never against a competant opponent). He's always been loyal to a couple of openings... that's why his games are always so boring to read.
Indeed, that's why the average PC chess program has been getting progressively stronger. There are iterative improvements in the algorithms, of course, but mostly its just more Instructions per Second.
In the 6502 days, even the best written computer chess programs topped out at 1300 or so. By the 386 they were playing at candidate master levels, and now they can hold their own with about anybody.
I remember writing a chess program in Fortran IV in college and wondering why it was so weak on the CP/M server in the lab (I almost always beat it in 20 moves or less) and yet when I ran the same code on a 386 it gave me such a tough match.
I'm sorry because he's a great player and all, but all this crap about how unfair it was is pathetic.
Look over those matches. Deepblue didn't play spectacularly, Kasparov just played miserable. He used openings that he has never used in tournament play and just generally slopped his way through obscure theoretical lines.
Hell, I could've beaten him if he'd played like that.
Actually the hardware is surprisingly affordable if you're willing to go a little lowend.
I'm in the process of building an UltraSparc box of my own using an old ATX SparcEngine UltraAXe. I bought all the components (except case) on eBay and have only spent about $200 (and that included a UW SCSI card and 18 GB 10k drive).
That gets you a 300 Mhz UltraSparc IIi, 256 MB of RAM, an 18 GB 10k UWSCSI drive, a 16x DVD Drive (ATAPI) and a UWSCSI card. Granted, its not quite a Sun Blade, but its still not terrible.
When I'm trying to secure a Wintel box the first thing I do is install a firewall program and tell it not to allow IE to do ANYTHING. Then install Mozilla or something similar.
Not perfect, but at least the lizard has a verifiable codebase.
Can't see this being anything more than a niche device. If you don't have any more PCI slots for extra IDE controllers you probably don't have any more case room for extra drives either.
Personally I'd just use a reasonable size 10k SCSI drive to boot off of and then use the cheaper bigger IDE drives to mount/home and other storage directories.
I intended a couple years back and wrote a clone of those KOEI strategy games in inform.
Wish I could find the stupid thing,
Regulation of Robot Pets
on
Fritz's Hit List
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Makes sense, if not in this light.
After all, imported robot pets are finding employment without green cards and taking rewarding pet jobs away from more expensive to maintain domestic alternatives.
You laugh now, but when that little robotic R2-D2 takes your waitressing job because he's willing to work for less than minimum wage, you'll change your tunes!
that a foreign government can't get you if they really want to.
I'd advise everyone to do a little reading on a man called Gerhard Lauck.
He was/is an avowed neo-nazi who published material relating to his distasteful belief system in the United States (where it is of course perfectly legal, if considered bad form). He exported some of this material to Germany, where it is considered a serious crime.
Obviously the U.S. wouldn't extradite him, because freedom of the press is so important, but unfortunately for him while travelling in another country he was picked up by German authorities and pretty much smuggled acrossed the border to Germany, where he spent several years in prison.
Sometimes people lie about discoveries to make a buck. Does anyone honestly think the alchemists were just making honest mistakes about turning lead into gold?
It looks to me more like Sun is doing what they've been doing for a decade now, cleaning up all the boring stuff that doesn't real need the admins attention.
You can downgrade to an earlier version of media player, or use a different player.
If its a Win98 box you can uninstall the latest and greatest Media Player in add/remove programs, and 99.9% of the plugins will work with the previous version, which doesn't try sending info out.
Given the platform, you still should have a firewall if you have anything close to valuable on it.
What's the deal? Are AMD and Intel just trying to drive me off the x86 platform or what?
What I don't get is what AMD says about Opting-in. Will we really be able to just "turn it off" in CMOS or something? Or does that mean "if you don't like it, don't buy the chip"?
I don't see the point of it if we can just turn it off at will. Lets see, CMOS settings, Do you want Microsoft to be able to delete content on your computer without your knowledge and do you want this chip to refuse to run on many programs? Yes or no.
And here I'd been waiting for one of these to power my next computer. Oh well, Apple or Sun I guess.
I don't believe Corel ever actually violated the GPL did they? I mean, they sold commercial apps that weren't open source for Linux, but there's nothing in the GPL about that.
Slashdot Mirror
Failsafe against 86 hour fatal gaming runs is built into Windows, its called BSODs.
Microsoft intentionally put them in there to make you go get a snack while rebooting, or conversely take a nap.
This fellow was clearly using Mac OSX or Linux.
Geez, a little hard on this post, aren't you? I've had jobs adminning Windows computers where I did 12-13 systems of admin and I still had time to do all the accounting and train people on the use of equipment. Managing 10 systems is nearly trivial unless you've got a bunch of idiots using them. I'd much rather admin Linux systems because that's more fun, but I don't buy that a good admin can do 10x as many Linux boxes. More probably, but not 10x.
Yeah, but lets say I, who have no professional tournament experience, was going to play Mr. Kasparov. Now, I've got probably 10-15 books which feature most of his significant games. He probably doesn't have access to ANY of my games. But if I went out and beat him cold in a tournament, would it be any less impressive? If I did would everyone be arguing I should have been forced to forget all those games before the match to "keep it fair"? Besides which, that database of prior games was more useful as a psych-out tool than an actual game tool. Nowhere in DB's list of games did he ever run into GK opening with the Caro-Kann or any of other openings he used (at least never against a competant opponent). He's always been loyal to a couple of openings... that's why his games are always so boring to read.
Indeed, that's why the average PC chess program has been getting progressively stronger. There are iterative improvements in the algorithms, of course, but mostly its just more Instructions per Second. In the 6502 days, even the best written computer chess programs topped out at 1300 or so. By the 386 they were playing at candidate master levels, and now they can hold their own with about anybody. I remember writing a chess program in Fortran IV in college and wondering why it was so weak on the CP/M server in the lab (I almost always beat it in 20 moves or less) and yet when I ran the same code on a 386 it gave me such a tough match.
Kasparov beat himself.
I'm sorry because he's a great player and all, but all this crap about how unfair it was is pathetic.
Look over those matches. Deepblue didn't play spectacularly, Kasparov just played miserable. He used openings that he has never used in tournament play and just generally slopped his way through obscure theoretical lines.
Hell, I could've beaten him if he'd played like that.
Indeed, C's strength comes form the large number of extremely experienced programmers who've been doing it for years and years.
Better to go with what you know than waste time on the stilted syntax of some crazy moonman language that could theoretically do it with less typing.
Actually the hardware is surprisingly affordable if you're willing to go a little lowend.
I'm in the process of building an UltraSparc box of my own using an old ATX SparcEngine UltraAXe. I bought all the components (except case) on eBay and have only spent about $200 (and that included a UW SCSI card and 18 GB 10k drive).
That gets you a 300 Mhz UltraSparc IIi, 256 MB of RAM, an 18 GB 10k UWSCSI drive, a 16x DVD Drive (ATAPI) and a UWSCSI card. Granted, its not quite a Sun Blade, but its still not terrible.
When I'm trying to secure a Wintel box the first thing I do is install a firewall program and tell it not to allow IE to do ANYTHING. Then install Mozilla or something similar. Not perfect, but at least the lizard has a verifiable codebase.
Can't see this being anything more than a niche device. If you don't have any more PCI slots for extra IDE controllers you probably don't have any more case room for extra drives either.
/home and other storage directories.
Personally I'd just use a reasonable size 10k SCSI drive to boot off of and then use the cheaper bigger IDE drives to mount
I intended a couple years back and wrote a clone of those KOEI strategy games in inform. Wish I could find the stupid thing,
Makes sense, if not in this light.
After all, imported robot pets are finding employment without green cards and taking rewarding pet jobs away from more expensive to maintain domestic alternatives.
You laugh now, but when that little robotic R2-D2 takes your waitressing job because he's willing to work for less than minimum wage, you'll change your tunes!
that a foreign government can't get you if they really want to.
I'd advise everyone to do a little reading on a man called Gerhard Lauck.
He was/is an avowed neo-nazi who published material relating to his distasteful belief system in the United States (where it is of course perfectly legal, if considered bad form). He exported some of this material to Germany, where it is considered a serious crime.
Obviously the U.S. wouldn't extradite him, because freedom of the press is so important, but unfortunately for him while travelling in another country he was picked up by German authorities and pretty much smuggled acrossed the border to Germany, where he spent several years in prison.
Bah, this is nothing new.
Sometimes people lie about discoveries to make a buck. Does anyone honestly think the alchemists were just making honest mistakes about turning lead into gold?
The layperson isn't getting their Linux news from slashdot, so I doubt it matters that much.
Indeed, in a way Sun might attract more Sysadmins to their platform with things like this.
After all, who wouldn't like an admin job where all the mundane stuff is automatic and all your time is available for the really interesting stuff?
It looks to me more like Sun is doing what they've been doing for a decade now, cleaning up all the boring stuff that doesn't real need the admins attention.
SBC made over $6 billion dollars in profit in the last 12 months. They must be doing something right.
UltraSparc's releasing a 1.2 Ghz this week. Bet those things fricking scream. I swear my 300 Mhz UltraSparc IIi outperforms my Duron 900.
But surely once the universe begins to collapse in on itself the net entropy of the universe will begin to decrease.
:)
When that happens I think we're all pretty screwed.
On the plus side, you'll be able to warm up cold coffee just by stirring
The true leading cause of death in WWI was being impaled on a kaiser helmet... don't you guys ever watch the history channel?
That would depend if the DRM enabled processor allows the deletion of data from the partition of a non-DRM enabled operating system.
If the chip gives outsiders (errm... authorized personel) the ability to rm stuff from my BSD box, then I see a huge problem.
They already said it will delete unauthorized content if the "server" says so. Whether that means only in Palladium or not is the real question.
You can downgrade to an earlier version of media player, or use a different player.
If its a Win98 box you can uninstall the latest and greatest Media Player in add/remove programs, and 99.9% of the plugins will work with the previous version, which doesn't try sending info out.
Given the platform, you still should have a firewall if you have anything close to valuable on it.
What's the deal? Are AMD and Intel just trying to drive me off the x86 platform or what?
What I don't get is what AMD says about Opting-in. Will we really be able to just "turn it off" in CMOS or something? Or does that mean "if you don't like it, don't buy the chip"?
I don't see the point of it if we can just turn it off at will. Lets see, CMOS settings, Do you want Microsoft to be able to delete content on your computer without your knowledge and do you want this chip to refuse to run on many programs? Yes or no.
And here I'd been waiting for one of these to power my next computer. Oh well, Apple or Sun I guess.
I don't believe Corel ever actually violated the GPL did they? I mean, they sold commercial apps that weren't open source for Linux, but there's nothing in the GPL about that.
Indeed, its a bit like charging someone with breaking and entering because your idiot brother let them in.