the google-watch server is too busy, i guess i'll get the pages from the google cache
Re:Babel Fish is laying Yakov easter eggs
on
Pyromaniac Cosplay
·
· Score: 1
"In Soviet Russia, mountain wooden YOU!"
LOL.
Allright, the burger comparison was kind of silly actually, it was really really very silly but the point was that once your money is converted into food, you can tell what the order was (i.e. the contents of the message), but not in which language the order was or in which currency you paid (i.e. the original language of the message). To stress that the currency doesn't matter, I had to think of food that is available and the same all over the world. If you're in Japan and actually dining at a high-class restaurant, most dishes will taste strange anyway:-)
Chief editor: Because, so it is to say, mountain wooden you. Mountain wood: Meaning is not recognized. At least, please insert subject and predicate.
I wonder how so many Americans can still believe that Babelfish is capable of translating anything more complicated than 'good morning'. Of course, people who are not aware of the actual quality of the babelfishations typically don't speak any foreign language, but I don't think this is true in case of SHEENmaster. I'd rather guess for him even English is kind of a foreign language.
Anyway, the practice of giving a babelfished link with the comment 'here's the translation' is just plain stupid. Of course, if it's a language you don't know at all, Babelfish can give you hints about a site's contents and often even reveal details of what is being said. When you try to write a few sentences in a language you know a little, entering them into Babelfish can give you some clues as to wheter their spelling and grammar is correct (e.g., does it convert back into English?). But translate it does most definitely not.
One more thing I'd like to mention:
Oriental languages still sound weird when translated to me
This is utter bullshit, it's like saying your MacDonalds burger tastes strange because you paid it in Yen. If something is in English, it's in English. There's no accent and nothing weird. Otherwise, it hasn't been properly translated.
Now do yourself a favor and learn a foreign language; even basic Esperanto knowledge will make you smarter.
> because by law there had to be somebody
> out in front carrying a lantern on foot.
I once read about a law requiring this only if a woman is driving the car. And, I guess, that it is still in place in one state. Ah, yes, the wonderful US legislation...:-)
It's sad how the design of US towns and streets is focused on cars. Over here, we have cycle lanes (sadly, also not enough) and probably would/will make the Segways drive there. The same was done with rollerskaters: too fast and dangerous for the sidewalks, too slow and fragile for the streets.
> When cars were introduced, the same thing happened.
No, not really. First cars were going rather slow, just because they didn't have the horsepower to go faster. And although they weren't very severe because of the low speeds and very large (compared to a Segway) vehicles involved, there were many, many accidents because there were no rules, no one had a driver's license and no one knew how to avoid the inherent dangers.
after a while, they implemented clever ideas like traffic lights and stuff.
> I guess it depends upon the load, eh?
That's exactly what I thought. I have batteries that are _much_ smaller and last for _years_, and I'm using them for over ten years now. In my watches...
you are right, kiddie-compatible versions of nethack make it easier to get _into_ the game, because you don't have to learn lots of one-key-commands and minimalistic graphical representations at once.
however, once you're into the game, if you still prefer the graphical version, there must be something wrong with you; maybe you watched too much tv and it totally destroyed your ability to _imagine_ something yourself. the standard nethack interface is so immersive because the visualisation takes place in your imagination. the interface is very minimalistic and abstract, but your mind puts it together to a whole world.
sure, it would be nice to have a 3D interface on top of that. but falcon's eye goes but a tiny fraction of the necessary effort into that direction. if you want a truely graphical representation, you'd have to implement several orders of magnitudes more things than falcon's eye does. it would be necessary to draw a world that is not visibly divided into squares, to make every single NPC, even those of the same race, look slightly different, to have smooth animations for every single action (and there are thousands), etc. etc. anything less wouldn't cut it, anything less would make the game less unrealistic.
and the original game already is quite silly to begin with. the code is one big hack and causes inconsistencies to pop up constantly. for example, if you're blind, you can get the message "you feel here a blue gem". many bugs of that kind have been fixed, but lots are still there. these are just tiny annoyances, but try to build a consistent, immersive 3d world on top of that...
what nethack would need before everything else would be a complete rewrite with modern techniques (e.g. OOP). that wouldn't be that hard, because the program isn't as huge as the developers pretend. the source isn't huge, it's just bloated and kludgy, because more than half of the game's _content_ is hardcoded into the _program_. disgusting.
So who would benefit? Asian pirates on a commercial level - they could start pressing counterfeit XBOX titles en masse, just like they did with Dreamcast.
You mean counterfeit, as in copy of an already existing xDVD on the market? You wouldn't need any secret/private key for doing that at all. So, I'd say, this whole argument is totally idiotic.
It's reminiscent of the PSX's scheme - 'bad' sectors on the disc that cant be replicated with a burner
The PSX uses CD-ROMs, which, if they had misfeatures like bad sectors, couldn't be burned when the PSX was new. But new burners became available, and now there some that burn anything you want, down to the subchannels and whatsitcalled. It won't be long until the same happens for DVDs.
Hmm... maybe you'll understand my comment if you read it another time. But _before_ you do so you should make sure you understand the difference between a mere CPU and an entire box, complete with chipset, BIOS, gfx board, sfx board and all the other parts. BOCHS is a virtual box, and it does _not ever_ translate the binary code into native instructions. It takes this code as it is and executes it on a CPU that is completely emulated, including the registers, flags, busses and caches. This is a virtual machine, and this is _slow_.
Morphing the code so it runs natevily on the physical CPU you actually have is a different thing, which you can easily understand by considering that a virtual machine does not equal a real one:-) And this code morphing, or "converting chunks of machine code" (which you mistakenly called asm), is not really a clever plan; think of how hard it would be to morph code from an entirely different architecture that, for example, has much smaller caches, but much wider busses; a much smaller instruction set, but also much less general purpose registers; you get the idea. Of course it is perfectly possible to do such a thing, but it is not possible to do it both efficiently and automatically. The PS2 runs at 250MHz, but if you want an emulator on a consumer desktop PC, it takes at least a 250MHz CPU to emulate the PlayStation ONE.
So, while you could morph some native code into slightly more efficient native code (by using new features like SIMD) _on the SAME platform_, you cannot emulate the _whole box_ and still be more efficient, see?
Ah, now that I've seen the page I know why I've been wondering so much about your statement above...
In fact a company that I will possibly be working for has managed to do this [emulate a whole machine in software] but get the code to run faster than it runs natively!
That's nonsense. All they're claiming to virtualize is a CPU, and even that is not truly emulated, because they don't execute the original binary code on the virtual CPU, but use it instead to generate new binary code that will run on another CPU. They try to optimize this code to make it run faster, but this is completely different to emulating a whole machine using CPU foo or any other and make it run faster than it would natively on CPU foo.
Seems like everyone thinks the V in DVD stands for video.
Sure, because it actually does (as well as versatile). No one who has a say in naming these discs (Toshiba, Phillips, the DVD whitepaper,...) ever says video was wrong. Only smart-asses who desperately want to show off their cleverness do. Today it is widely accepted that DVD is just a name for a DVD and the letters don't have any special meaning. That doesn't mean, however, that digital videodisc or digital versatile disc were wrong. You may use both.
Would you please tell us the name of that company and this mysterious product? I'd like to submit it to wired.com as suggestion for their upcoming article on vaporware.
It's a TV show. They're not taped picking their noses, they're filmed 24/7 in what is essentially a nicer prison and broadcast to all over Britain as they pick their noses.
Gibberish? According to their site (to which I came from textism.com, where you can find an excellent write-up on the song), there's a Spanish and a 'Spanglish' version. Maybe the latter was what you took for gibberish?
Re:Hurry! We can still influence the 2002 results!
on
Web Zeitgeist
·
· Score: 1
Does that mean that on/. a shameless plug for some books that are for sale will become "5, Insightful" once you repeat it over and over and over and over?
I wanted to post something like this (parent) earlier on, but my connection went dead before i hit submit, so I put it here now:
As my friend Billy S. said: "What's in a TLD name? That which we call a foo by any other name would be as easy to google."
The concept of searching for content by trying out an 'address' is SO 1990ies... Of course, if I want the site of the Austrian postal service, I can be pretty sure that it will be at post.at and try that first. Other names might not be that straight-forward, but still easier to remember, like bmf.gv.at for the BundesMinisterium für Finanzen, which is part of the GoVernment of AusTria. But you only remember that address if you already found out (with Google etc.) that it's basicly saying 'Bundesministerium für Finanzen', and not the more commonly used shorter term 'Finanzministerium'.
Everything less official doesn't have intuitive domain names any longer because there have been way too much name clashes already. If a new movie about foo is released, the site isn't foo.com, it's foo-the-movie-com, foomovie.com, $$$productions.com/foo or something like that. No one tries any of these, as a search engine query will lead to the target much faster. People who want free pr0n aren't trying freepr0n.com any longer.
By the time anything like.travel will be well known and widely used by the respective sites, people will generally be googling their way to the desired sites anyway. Of course, the intention behind the new TLDs is to make the names intuitive again, like in the old days when you went to pizza.com when you wanted to order a pizza on-line. But with a great amount of TLDs, where do you go to? pizza.food, pizza.delivery, pizza.homeshopping or get-me-some.pizza? Any anyway, how many TV stations actually bought a.tv domain when it was made available from Tuvalu?
So, what's in a name? Nothing at all, it doesn't matter to people anyway. It's just nicer to have something 'human-readable' for writing it down instead of an IP number, but once everyone carries around their bookmarks on PDAs (or wristwatches or smartcards) and does the drag-and-drop instead of the scribble-on-paper thing, even those would be okay as addresses, even if they were in decimal format.
It is something completely different to not be presented with any goals and then figure out both "I need to fly" and "This is how I can fly".
Something that doesn't have any goal doesn't need to fly, nor need to do anything else. Flying around without any reason is not really impressive. If something can find out that it needs to fly, then flying must be required for reaching a pre-defined goal, e.g. finding food. Consequently, the conclusion "I need to fly" is part of the self-discovered solution "This is how I can find food", which is not fundamentally different from the self-discovered solution "This is how I can fly".
So, no, these things are not completely different. A creature's basic needs (in nature, anyway) are always hardwired instincts that don't have to be discovered with impressive intellectual effort. The what is always given, the interesting part always is the how.
Now, whether the butterfly was given specific goals when it was created or whether it had to come up with it's own...
'Genuine' (as opposed to artificial) butterflies weren't created, they weren't given any goals and the concept of 'coming up with something' is completely out of their intellect's grasp. The only goals they're naturally, inherently pursuing are survival and reproduction; if they weren't, there wouldn't be any butterflies.
[ The robot that taught itself how to fly cheated. ]
IIRC, that was just the first solution the robot came up with. After the developers made it impossible to cheat that way, the robot did in fact behave as he was supposed to. It didn't really take off very much, because it was way too heavy to really fly, but it found out how to push itself upwards, which was its objective.
But taken as a whole, the butterflys nervous system contains a behavorial complexity that simply can not be delivered by MIPS, or any other deconstructionest viewpoint.
If you're thinking about writing algorithms (if-then-else-style) that emulate a butterfly's behaviour down to every wing-movement and fitting them into a tiny microchip: yes, that would be _very_ hard.
Of course you can't actually achieve anything with wrist-watch technology; however, there are alternatives: Self-learning algorithms, neural networks, genetic algorithms, etc. There was that/. story about a robot that taught itself how to fly, remember? As I said above: you don't have to re-invent nature, you can copy and emulate nature instead. Much less effort.
> The butterfly has had hundreds of
> millions of years to develop it's
> flight model.
So what? The lotus flower had at least as much time to develop its self-cleaning petals, but it took human scientists just a few years to develop an agent that gives any glass surface the same property just by spraying it on. It forms the same nano structures that make water drops, which take every trace of dust and dirt with them, flow off completely, or even drops of super glue.
> It's about the finely tuned control
> mechanisim (in this case, butterfly brain)
Oh look, behold the mighty powers of the butterfly brain, which is about as intelligent as my cheapo Casio watch. I don't see much problems with emulating this. By the way, most of the 'knowledge' about flying isn't in that tiny butterfly brain anyway, it's hardwired into the nervous system. The wings flap so fast that the delay of sending impulses all the way to the brain and back all the time would be too big.
In the atmosphere of Mars, the are only 1.5% the molecules we have. The composition is also evry different, but the point is: it's _very_ thin. OTOH, the gravity on Mars is about 38% of Earth's gravity.
So if you have something that flies on Earth, it's still a long way to go until you get it to fly on Mars.
Entropy is so cool. You get to choose what your avatar is like, every detail, regardless of what you are in reality. All players are equal, there is no discrimination by nationality, skin colour, religion or gender. It's just that the rich are a little more equal than the poor.
Using a quotation mark instead of an apostrophe just because it will look OK most of the time is like using a instead of just because it will look OK most of the time: It's a Bad Thing, especially if accessibility is of concern; it makes it harder for software to make sense of the text and render it correctly on alternative devices.
Slashdot Mirror
the google-watch server is too busy, i guess i'll get the pages from the google cache
Allright, the burger comparison was kind of silly actually, it was really really very silly but the point was that once your money is converted into food, you can tell what the order was (i.e. the contents of the message), but not in which language the order was or in which currency you paid (i.e. the original language of the message). To stress that the currency doesn't matter, I had to think of food that is available and the same all over the world. If you're in Japan and actually dining at a high-class restaurant, most dishes will taste strange anyway
So, err, sorry for the crippled metaphor.
I wonder how so many Americans can still believe that Babelfish is capable of translating anything more complicated than 'good morning'. Of course, people who are not aware of the actual quality of the babelfishations typically don't speak any foreign language, but I don't think this is true in case of SHEENmaster. I'd rather guess for him even English is kind of a foreign language.
Anyway, the practice of giving a babelfished link with the comment 'here's the translation' is just plain stupid. Of course, if it's a language you don't know at all, Babelfish can give you hints about a site's contents and often even reveal details of what is being said. When you try to write a few sentences in a language you know a little, entering them into Babelfish can give you some clues as to wheter their spelling and grammar is correct (e.g., does it convert back into English?). But translate it does most definitely not.
One more thing I'd like to mention: This is utter bullshit, it's like saying your MacDonalds burger tastes strange because you paid it in Yen. If something is in English, it's in English. There's no accent and nothing weird. Otherwise, it hasn't been properly translated.
Now do yourself a favor and learn a foreign language; even basic Esperanto knowledge will make you smarter.
> because by law there had to be somebody
:-)
> out in front carrying a lantern on foot.
I once read about a law requiring this only if a woman is driving the car. And, I guess, that it is still in place in one state. Ah, yes, the wonderful US legislation...
It's sad how the design of US towns and streets is focused on cars. Over here, we have cycle lanes (sadly, also not enough) and probably would/will make the Segways drive there. The same was done with rollerskaters: too fast and dangerous for the sidewalks, too slow and fragile for the streets.
> When cars were introduced, the same thing happened.
No, not really. First cars were going rather slow, just because they didn't have the horsepower to go faster. And although they weren't very severe because of the low speeds and very large (compared to a Segway) vehicles involved, there were many, many accidents because there were no rules, no one had a driver's license and no one knew how to avoid the inherent dangers.
after a while, they implemented clever ideas like traffic lights and stuff.
> I guess it depends upon the load, eh?
That's exactly what I thought. I have batteries that are _much_ smaller and last for _years_, and I'm using them for over ten years now. In my watches...
you are right, kiddie-compatible versions of nethack make it easier to get _into_ the game, because you don't have to learn lots of one-key-commands and minimalistic graphical representations at once.
however, once you're into the game, if you still prefer the graphical version, there must be something wrong with you; maybe you watched too much tv and it totally destroyed your ability to _imagine_ something yourself. the standard nethack interface is so immersive because the visualisation takes place in your imagination. the interface is very minimalistic and abstract, but your mind puts it together to a whole world.
sure, it would be nice to have a 3D interface on top of that. but falcon's eye goes but a tiny fraction of the necessary effort into that direction. if you want a truely graphical representation, you'd have to implement several orders of magnitudes more things than falcon's eye does. it would be necessary to draw a world that is not visibly divided into squares, to make every single NPC, even those of the same race, look slightly different, to have smooth animations for every single action (and there are thousands), etc. etc. anything less wouldn't cut it, anything less would make the game less unrealistic.
and the original game already is quite silly to begin with. the code is one big hack and causes inconsistencies to pop up constantly. for example, if you're blind, you can get the message "you feel here a blue gem". many bugs of that kind have been fixed, but lots are still there. these are just tiny annoyances, but try to build a consistent, immersive 3d world on top of that...
what nethack would need before everything else would be a complete rewrite with modern techniques (e.g. OOP). that wouldn't be that hard, because the program isn't as huge as the developers pretend. the source isn't huge, it's just bloated and kludgy, because more than half of the game's _content_ is hardcoded into the _program_. disgusting.
The PSX uses CD-ROMs, which, if they had misfeatures like bad sectors, couldn't be burned when the PSX was new. But new burners became available, and now there some that burn anything you want, down to the subchannels and whatsitcalled. It won't be long until the same happens for DVDs.
Hmm... maybe you'll understand my comment if you read it another time. But _before_ you do so you should make sure you understand the difference between a mere CPU and an entire box, complete with chipset, BIOS, gfx board, sfx board and all the other parts. BOCHS is a virtual box, and it does _not ever_ translate the binary code into native instructions. It takes this code as it is and executes it on a CPU that is completely emulated, including the registers, flags, busses and caches. This is a virtual machine, and this is _slow_.
:-) And this code morphing, or "converting chunks of machine code" (which you mistakenly called asm), is not really a clever plan; think of how hard it would be to morph code from an entirely different architecture that, for example, has much smaller caches, but much wider busses; a much smaller instruction set, but also much less general purpose registers; you get the idea. Of course it is perfectly possible to do such a thing, but it is not possible to do it both efficiently and automatically. The PS2 runs at 250MHz, but if you want an emulator on a consumer desktop PC, it takes at least a 250MHz CPU to emulate the PlayStation ONE.
Morphing the code so it runs natevily on the physical CPU you actually have is a different thing, which you can easily understand by considering that a virtual machine does not equal a real one
So, while you could morph some native code into slightly more efficient native code (by using new features like SIMD) _on the SAME platform_, you cannot emulate the _whole box_ and still be more efficient, see?
It's a TV show. They're not taped picking their noses, they're filmed 24/7 in what is essentially a nicer prison and broadcast to all over Britain as they pick their noses.
Gibberish? According to their site (to which I came from textism.com, where you can find an excellent write-up on the song), there's a Spanish and a 'Spanglish' version. Maybe the latter was what you took for gibberish?
What do you mean, sick and twisted things? Something like this?
"my document" hangs when explored
all fords ever maked
rape step by step pics
A place to play dating tests for kids age 11 to find out if I'm boyfriend material.
GAY WOMEN SPANK ME AND ARE SHITTING JIZZ OUT OF THEIR CUNTS
pres.bush in picture with hitler
WOMEN NUDE THAT 18 YEAR OLDS CAN LOOK AT!
touch typping
spell for larger penis
Nope, never seen such a disgusting site, sorry. Not here at work, anyway.
Does that mean that on /. a shameless plug for some books that are for sale will become "5, Insightful" once you repeat it over and over and over and over?
I wanted to post something like this (parent) earlier on, but my connection went dead before i hit submit, so I put it here now:
.travel will be well known and widely used by the respective sites, people will generally be googling their way to the desired sites anyway. Of course, the intention behind the new TLDs is to make the names intuitive again, like in the old days when you went to pizza.com when you wanted to order a pizza on-line. But with a great amount of TLDs, where do you go to? pizza.food, pizza.delivery, pizza.homeshopping or get-me-some.pizza? Any anyway, how many TV stations actually bought a .tv domain when it was made available from Tuvalu?
As my friend Billy S. said: "What's in a TLD name? That which we call a foo by any other name would be as easy to google."
The concept of searching for content by trying out an 'address' is SO 1990ies... Of course, if I want the site of the Austrian postal service, I can be pretty sure that it will be at post.at and try that first. Other names might not be that straight-forward, but still easier to remember, like bmf.gv.at for the BundesMinisterium für Finanzen, which is part of the GoVernment of AusTria. But you only remember that address if you already found out (with Google etc.) that it's basicly saying 'Bundesministerium für Finanzen', and not the more commonly used shorter term 'Finanzministerium'.
Everything less official doesn't have intuitive domain names any longer because there have been way too much name clashes already. If a new movie about foo is released, the site isn't foo.com, it's foo-the-movie-com, foomovie.com, $$$productions.com/foo or something like that. No one tries any of these, as a search engine query will lead to the target much faster. People who want free pr0n aren't trying freepr0n.com any longer.
By the time anything like
So, what's in a name? Nothing at all, it doesn't matter to people anyway. It's just nicer to have something 'human-readable' for writing it down instead of an IP number, but once everyone carries around their bookmarks on PDAs (or wristwatches or smartcards) and does the drag-and-drop instead of the scribble-on-paper thing, even those would be okay as addresses, even if they were in decimal format.
So, no, these things are not completely different. A creature's basic needs (in nature, anyway) are always hardwired instincts that don't have to be discovered with impressive intellectual effort. The what is always given, the interesting part always is the how. 'Genuine' (as opposed to artificial) butterflies weren't created, they weren't given any goals and the concept of 'coming up with something' is completely out of their intellect's grasp. The only goals they're naturally, inherently pursuing are survival and reproduction; if they weren't, there wouldn't be any butterflies.
The experiment was in fact a success.
If you're thinking about writing algorithms (if-then-else-style) that emulate a butterfly's behaviour down to every wing-movement and fitting them into a tiny microchip: yes, that would be _very_ hard.
Of course you can't actually achieve anything with wrist-watch technology; however, there are alternatives: Self-learning algorithms, neural networks, genetic algorithms, etc. There was that
> The butterfly has had hundreds of
> millions of years to develop it's
> flight model.
So what? The lotus flower had at least as much time to develop its self-cleaning petals, but it took human scientists just a few years to develop an agent that gives any glass surface the same property just by spraying it on. It forms the same nano structures that make water drops, which take every trace of dust and dirt with them, flow off completely, or even drops of super glue.
> It's about the finely tuned control
> mechanisim (in this case, butterfly brain)
Oh look, behold the mighty powers of the butterfly brain, which is about as intelligent as my cheapo Casio watch. I don't see much problems with emulating this. By the way, most of the 'knowledge' about flying isn't in that tiny butterfly brain anyway, it's hardwired into the nervous system. The wings flap so fast that the delay of sending impulses all the way to the brain and back all the time would be too big.
In the atmosphere of Mars, the are only 1.5% the molecules we have. The composition is also evry different, but the point is: it's _very_ thin. OTOH, the gravity on Mars is about 38% of Earth's gravity.
So if you have something that flies on Earth, it's still a long way to go until you get it to fly on Mars.
Entropy is so cool. You get to choose what your avatar is like, every detail, regardless of what you are in reality. All players are equal, there is no discrimination by nationality, skin colour, religion or gender. It's just that the rich are a little more equal than the poor.
Using a quotation mark instead of an apostrophe just because it will look OK most of the time is like using a instead of just because it will look OK most of the time: It's a Bad Thing, especially if accessibility is of concern; it makes it harder for software to make sense of the text and render it correctly on alternative devices.
Yes, _of course_ Unicode makes a distinction.