"So basically, we're not allowed to point out what we do well, even though everyone can point out all our failings?"
Yes but you forget, it's usually Americans bitching about America the loudest. We generally feel our own country sucks and is a police state. Probably because IT IS a police state. We don't question whether or not our government is corrupt, instead we argue with each other about what degree of MASSIVE widespread corruption exists, and not what our leaders would stoop to, but rather how competent they are to manufacture good wool to pull over our eyes.
Let's face it, the only time we get together and unite is in bitching about our own coutry and blaming the Canadians. This is of course all Canada's fault of course. And the EU's too.
The beagle doesn't run linux. The software to remote control it was linux based. The linux part was never employed because it's hard to control something that has created the deepest hole in the surface of mars!
obviosly the real answer would be to land on the martian north pole and in place of some liquid simply detonate a nuclear explosion there upon failure. That way failure means a bold step in terraforming Mars, and the explosion would be reasonably detectable I suspect.
I would love to agree with you, but if this is true, where are the systems?
When was the last time you say an IBM Desktop system that was less than 2yrs old in the hands of someone who was not an IBM employee or an IBM employee's family? The notebooks I see once in awhile but certainly not as often as Toshiba's and others.
I could on for hours on this subject. But I agree with you, considerations have to be made for what your working with.
I don't think they have to made for your whims and preferences. "I prefer tool x, even though the shop and other programmers use tool y", that's the kind of thing that doesn't need to fly.
As for the $100, that's for the test network, not your development software. Anything special you need there shouldn't come out of my budget at all, it should come out of the budget for your project, standard already approved development tools should have been on the pc before you were even hired. Your personal preferred tools are your personal problem and don't need to be on the network of course. You do NOT need to try out this or that development tool at work, you can do it on the test network or at home on your own time.
But that said, if you develop Mac software, damnit you should have a Mac to develop it on. I might lock it down with an iron fist, or not allow it on the corporate network since you will of course be loading software on it I haven't approved and we can't have a security hole.
There already are plenty of theoretical proof's. But I'll make a new one for you. Humans are merely biological computers, therefore it's theoretically possible to equal their intelligence with an electronic computer.
There you go, theoretical proofs. Hell it's more solid than MOST of the prevailing theoretical facts out there that we consider foundations of modern science.
When YOU will see a computer that approaches the capabilities (I assume you mean intellectual capabilities, it might be awhile before you see the robotic technology and AI technology combined in a package that is equal to or superior to a human) of a human is one thing.
But several have seen it, and psychologists have spoken to a computer AI which is being grown like a human being and so far hasn't had any trouble fooling those child psychologists into believing it is a real child of it's age at every stage of the game. Because it's being grown however, it will be another decade before we find out whether it will continue to successfully learn until fully grown.
bah, it's risky against another player. I haven't ever lost even ONE scenerio against the computer this way.
Walls are nice and all, but they cost too much money and take two seconds to blow up. Hell the 3rd rank or so of my tanks hasn't even fallen into place before they've already eaten through your wall. Of course you have to manually control your tanks and concentrate the full force fire on individual targets so that most everything dies or is blown up instantly. Dividing your fire is great, but you'll find reducing enemy numbers rapidly is a better technique then spreading fire among multiple enemies. Each enemy taken down isn't shooting you anymore.
I've tried the wall technique, because the computer AI does put FAR too much weight to walls and trying to go around rather than through them. C&C has weak walls so this is stupid. I've found you sometimes lose with it, because it diverts attention and energy away from building tanks. And valuable ore, later in the game you will probably make up for it, but by then the computer has it's own army. Hell by the time I have a legion of twenty tanks coming in the computer maybe has about five.
I've written a neural network, nothing especially fancy tis true. But nonetheless I'd say it easily covers the ground of "a couple classes".
Neural networks are merely an extremely flawed emulator of the actual function of neurons... or rather something of a combination of the above and the results of our poking a stick at the above and seeing what it does.
Truth be told they have little to do with AI, and AI has little to do with them. If you want to emulate biological intelligence, you look to a neural network. If you want to create artificial electronic intelligence, you don't.
From two comments (which certainly isn't much) I suspect you either believe you are some sort of superior authority on the subject (which you obviously are not if your level can be achieved in a couple classes, or any number of "classes"), or your are the type who will never be satisfied with any sort of AI that has a mechanism and function which we entirely fathom and understand. Neural networks are such a thing, although on a micro level we understand them, we don't fully know the how and why of the way they achieve their end results.
Biological neural emulation is great and a fascinating study. But's it's not even the most successful and advanced of AI progress out there. The most probable chance (of human level intelligence, since that's make believe standard set for some before they'll call it AI) we have has to be grown and matured like a child and is in the process, thus far it has been passing the turing tests for it's ages as it grows.
do you still see explorer.exe in memory? That's the same thing as iexplorer.
iexplorer is really just a stub to explorer.exe, so no internet explorer never really closes. You can further test this by typing a url in the path bar of an explorer window.
The C&C AI is easy to beat, build almost nothing, just mine ore as fast as you can and build a shitload of tanks. Make sure your ore is coming fast enough that you can build tanks nonstop, whatever you are doing, it's secondary to keeping the tanks rolling out.
When you have a sufficient legion of tanks, send them out and crush the enemy. If you don't crush them that's ok, so long as you never stopped building tanks. When you have another legion of tanks send them out. Of course choose your targets strategically, you want to cripple the enemy after all. And always makes sure each of your harvesters is guarded by a couple tanks.
When playing the computer building up is a waste of time. The computer of course will try to build up, and thus it will waste ore and ultimately never be able to win. If ore permits it's best to be able to build two tanks at a time of course. Three is wasting ore that could be used to buy tanks!
Personally I'd agree and disagree with both of you.
For the most part I agree with you, my direct parent poster. I don't believe that more or less skilled players should recieve different amounts of mana from heaven and increased health, or decreased enemy health etc.
I believe that there should be two basis on which to analyze the player (high level basis that is) skill and intelligence. The two are certainly NOT the same thing, although a player may be skilled and intelligent both. Basically the AI need only mimic the player in these respects.
Skill would be things like REACTION speed, enemy or beastie A should not move slower because a player is not skilled, enemy or beastie A should react slower and/or be less accurate when firing. Fast reactions and accuracy can be natural or trained but BOTH are matters of skill.
Intelligence is something else altogether, having more to do with tatics. To think of clever and workable tatics one must be intelligent and/or knowledgable. So the AI's tatical manuvers should be adjusted in this case.
A skilled and intelligent player will of course encounter AI that is very clever and employs it's clever tatics quickly, is skilled with it's arms and rarely misses a difficult shot.
An untalented and ignorant/stupid player will encounter AI that knows few moves and reacts slower, that AI is not as good a shot.
Of course the difficulty of the shot must be considered as well, even the most poorly skilled AI will never miss at point blank range, although it may hesitate when it should pull the trigger.
There should also be a lower boundy, the game only gets so easy. Since there is never mana from heaven, and health and speed never magically increase there is no need to worry about upper boundry, upper boundy is limited by the programmers ability to code intelligent tatics. An impossible shot is an impossible shot of course, but lightning fast reflexes do not make for an impossible to beat game.
"And yes, I know it's been a damn long time since arcade games cost a quarter, but I'm a child of the 80's:-)"
That's true, nodays the coin slots are mostly just for looks. After all, why bother charging yourself a quarter? And it's not like there are Arcades anymore.
That would depend on how the game actually goes about determining you suck and adjusting it's gameplay.
Let me give you a clue, being AI does not exclude and will certainly include analyzing statistics and responding by adjusting variables. The minute analyzing comes into play and it's something artificial doing it, THAT IS AI. Whether it's very bright or not is irrelevant. I know human beings that aren't as intelligent as Splinter Cell.
I do however believe that thanks to people like you, NOTHING will ever be entirely acknowledged as "TRUE" AI, even if it were identical in function to the human brain and perfectly recreated the chemical reactions and responses we call emotions, morals, feelings, 6th sense, etc.
"that is getting impossible to win if you are too good?"
The idea is that the difficulty should scale. Thus an uber player should be equally challenged as a first time player who has barely figured out the controls.
For you who is becoming a better player the game shouldn't get easier as you become more skilled, however it shouldn't be harder for you to win either, rather it should remain equally challenging. No this doesn't serve if your the type who likes to show his friends what a bad arse you are because you can wail through a game.
When it comes to video and music a digital stream which is not absolutely perfect is absolute trash.
Any interference whatsoever in music for instance causes gaps and silent pauses where equal interference on radio causes a slight bit of noise which you might not even notice.
The same with video, poor reception, big black bars and black screens or stutters, rather than a slightly fuzzy but perfectly watchable uninterrupted viewing.
You wouldn't, you'd buy Xgrid. It's simple math and microsoft certainly figured it out a long time ago. The markup on a piece of software is anywhere from let's see, $200 divided by $0.15, what does that come out to? Or you could sell the equivelent in hardware, $200 divided by $150. And for some odd reason you can easily manage to sell the software orders of magnitude more times than you'd manage to sell the hardware.
Making it Mac only will ensure that nobody ever knows about it.
Man I feel old, I remember when everyone used pc's but everybody knew what a mac was. Nobody however had heard of linux. Nowdays everyone still uses a pc, nobody knows what the hell a mac is, but everybody has heard of linux.
The difference? Mac's run on macs, everybody uses pc's.
64mb of RAM is oodles? wouldn't oodles be somewhere more in the ballpark of 1gb+? 64mb of ram is barely sufficient to run win98, let alone MacOS which prior to OSX lacked any reasonable form of swap without third party software.
The result was constantly running out of memory. And since pretty much everyone running on a mac requires lots of ram you'd run out of memory fairly quickly, often with no more than two or three applications running.
As for the sluggishness of 72pin RAM, I can only assume your joking, EDO ram was static memory and smoked compared to dynamic memories. Dynamic memory technology was cheaper, has bigger numbers (amusing that the faster it is, the more it needs rewritten and therefore the more it bogs down the processor and the more wait states while it refreshes). Static technology gets expensive when you talk anything much more than 128mb, while dynamic is cheap to 1-2gb.
Between processor bog and additional wait states and the fact these problems scale to the speed of the memory, it's highly debatable whether dynamic is overall superior to static. However saying that static memory is sluggish is insane.
Mozilla is resident in memory WHEN your actually running Mozilla, just like anything else. The mozilla quicklaunch would qualify as a "memory resident" application because it is ALWAYS running in memory.
Internet Explorer IS however a memory resident application, one you cannot remove and has a bigger footprint than Mozilla whilst DOING less.
iTunes was NOT and IS NOT as permissive as it gets, as permissive as it gets is no DRM. If the RIAA won't stop until they actually go bust, the answer is for us to not stop until they go bust either. It's not like their existance is beneficial in some way.
Now that's it's broken the media companies may push a more restrictive system, and then that system will be broken as well and so on and so forth until they do go bust or give up.
Hardware based DRM may or may not be pushed through, it faces some serious oposition from alot of big business as well as little guy players. The hardware manufacturers don't want to do it, and the RIAA will be in for a fight when it fights the likes of Dell, IBM, Apple who have some serious lobbying power and lots of money in their pockets.
If it is pushed through there will be a black market and contraband, music will STILL be pirated and nonpirated versions will be out. There will cracks to bypass the hardware DRM as well. It's not as if their techs are brighter than the rest of the world you know. Their technical capabilities do not exceed those of the hackers and crackers of the world united, trying to restrict copying via technical measures is a losing battle.
Eventually they will wither away or accept that they must protect their copyrights with the law and not technology, thier attempts at vigilante technological enforcement will fail, just like those of every other copyright holder who has walked that street and just like all their attempts to date.
What the hell are you talking about? Mozilla is open source, it's not produced by one company, and it has nothing to do with windows.
New releases are out about once a month and you can always download the cutting edge version that has a fix before as soon as it's fixed.
Furthermore since it is open source, you don't have to wait for anyone else to fix a problem. If it's worth it to you, you can fix the problem yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
"So basically, we're not allowed to point out what we do well, even though everyone can point out all our failings?"
Yes but you forget, it's usually Americans bitching about America the loudest. We generally feel our own country sucks and is a police state. Probably because IT IS a police state. We don't question whether or not our government is corrupt, instead we argue with each other about what degree of MASSIVE widespread corruption exists, and not what our leaders would stoop to, but rather how competent they are to manufacture good wool to pull over our eyes.
Let's face it, the only time we get together and unite is in bitching about our own coutry and blaming the Canadians. This is of course all Canada's fault of course. And the EU's too.
The beagle doesn't run linux. The software to remote control it was linux based. The linux part was never employed because it's hard to control something that has created the deepest hole in the surface of mars!
obviosly the real answer would be to land on the martian north pole and in place of some liquid simply detonate a nuclear explosion there upon failure. That way failure means a bold step in terraforming Mars, and the explosion would be reasonably detectable I suspect.
I would love to agree with you, but if this is true, where are the systems?
When was the last time you say an IBM Desktop system that was less than 2yrs old in the hands of someone who was not an IBM employee or an IBM employee's family? The notebooks I see once in awhile but certainly not as often as Toshiba's and others.
I seriously doubt they would have to do all that nonsense. Openoffice is already 99% of the way there. If they fill in the Access hole they are done.
I could on for hours on this subject. But I agree with you, considerations have to be made for what your working with.
I don't think they have to made for your whims and preferences. "I prefer tool x, even though the shop and other programmers use tool y", that's the kind of thing that doesn't need to fly.
As for the $100, that's for the test network, not your development software. Anything special you need there shouldn't come out of my budget at all, it should come out of the budget for your project, standard already approved development tools should have been on the pc before you were even hired. Your personal preferred tools are your personal problem and don't need to be on the network of course. You do NOT need to try out this or that development tool at work, you can do it on the test network or at home on your own time.
But that said, if you develop Mac software, damnit you should have a Mac to develop it on. I might lock it down with an iron fist, or not allow it on the corporate network since you will of course be loading software on it I haven't approved and we can't have a security hole.
There already are plenty of theoretical proof's. But I'll make a new one for you. Humans are merely biological computers, therefore it's theoretically possible to equal their intelligence with an electronic computer.
There you go, theoretical proofs. Hell it's more solid than MOST of the prevailing theoretical facts out there that we consider foundations of modern science.
When YOU will see a computer that approaches the capabilities (I assume you mean intellectual capabilities, it might be awhile before you see the robotic technology and AI technology combined in a package that is equal to or superior to a human) of a human is one thing.
But several have seen it, and psychologists have spoken to a computer AI which is being grown like a human being and so far hasn't had any trouble fooling those child psychologists into believing it is a real child of it's age at every stage of the game. Because it's being grown however, it will be another decade before we find out whether it will continue to successfully learn until fully grown.
bah, it's risky against another player. I haven't ever lost even ONE scenerio against the computer this way.
Walls are nice and all, but they cost too much money and take two seconds to blow up. Hell the 3rd rank or so of my tanks hasn't even fallen into place before they've already eaten through your wall. Of course you have to manually control your tanks and concentrate the full force fire on individual targets so that most everything dies or is blown up instantly. Dividing your fire is great, but you'll find reducing enemy numbers rapidly is a better technique then spreading fire among multiple enemies. Each enemy taken down isn't shooting you anymore.
I've tried the wall technique, because the computer AI does put FAR too much weight to walls and trying to go around rather than through them. C&C has weak walls so this is stupid. I've found you sometimes lose with it, because it diverts attention and energy away from building tanks. And valuable ore, later in the game you will probably make up for it, but by then the computer has it's own army. Hell by the time I have a legion of twenty tanks coming in the computer maybe has about five.
I've written a neural network, nothing especially fancy tis true. But nonetheless I'd say it easily covers the ground of "a couple classes".
Neural networks are merely an extremely flawed emulator of the actual function of neurons... or rather something of a combination of the above and the results of our poking a stick at the above and seeing what it does.
Truth be told they have little to do with AI, and AI has little to do with them. If you want to emulate biological intelligence, you look to a neural network. If you want to create artificial electronic intelligence, you don't.
From two comments (which certainly isn't much) I suspect you either believe you are some sort of superior authority on the subject (which you obviously are not if your level can be achieved in a couple classes, or any number of "classes"), or your are the type who will never be satisfied with any sort of AI that has a mechanism and function which we entirely fathom and understand. Neural networks are such a thing, although on a micro level we understand them, we don't fully know the how and why of the way they achieve their end results.
Biological neural emulation is great and a fascinating study. But's it's not even the most successful and advanced of AI progress out there. The most probable chance (of human level intelligence, since that's make believe standard set for some before they'll call it AI) we have has to be grown and matured like a child and is in the process, thus far it has been passing the turing tests for it's ages as it grows.
do you still see explorer.exe in memory? That's the same thing as iexplorer.
iexplorer is really just a stub to explorer.exe, so no internet explorer never really closes. You can further test this by typing a url in the path bar of an explorer window.
This was modded interesting? What kind of crack are the mods on?
Funny I wouldn't agree with but could at least see...
I'm with you on the rest but please tell me haven't bought into this mumbo jumbo that humans are anything more than biological computers?
The C&C AI is easy to beat, build almost nothing, just mine ore as fast as you can and build a shitload of tanks. Make sure your ore is coming fast enough that you can build tanks nonstop, whatever you are doing, it's secondary to keeping the tanks rolling out.
When you have a sufficient legion of tanks, send them out and crush the enemy. If you don't crush them that's ok, so long as you never stopped building tanks. When you have another legion of tanks send them out. Of course choose your targets strategically, you want to cripple the enemy after all. And always makes sure each of your harvesters is guarded by a couple tanks.
When playing the computer building up is a waste of time. The computer of course will try to build up, and thus it will waste ore and ultimately never be able to win. If ore permits it's best to be able to build two tanks at a time of course. Three is wasting ore that could be used to buy tanks!
Personally I'd agree and disagree with both of you.
For the most part I agree with you, my direct parent poster. I don't believe that more or less skilled players should recieve different amounts of mana from heaven and increased health, or decreased enemy health etc.
I believe that there should be two basis on which to analyze the player (high level basis that is) skill and intelligence. The two are certainly NOT the same thing, although a player may be skilled and intelligent both. Basically the AI need only mimic the player in these respects.
Skill would be things like REACTION speed, enemy or beastie A should not move slower because a player is not skilled, enemy or beastie A should react slower and/or be less accurate when firing. Fast reactions and accuracy can be natural or trained but BOTH are matters of skill.
Intelligence is something else altogether, having more to do with tatics. To think of clever and workable tatics one must be intelligent and/or knowledgable. So the AI's tatical manuvers should be adjusted in this case.
A skilled and intelligent player will of course encounter AI that is very clever and employs it's clever tatics quickly, is skilled with it's arms and rarely misses a difficult shot.
An untalented and ignorant/stupid player will encounter AI that knows few moves and reacts slower, that AI is not as good a shot.
Of course the difficulty of the shot must be considered as well, even the most poorly skilled AI will never miss at point blank range, although it may hesitate when it should pull the trigger.
There should also be a lower boundy, the game only gets so easy. Since there is never mana from heaven, and health and speed never magically increase there is no need to worry about upper boundry, upper boundy is limited by the programmers ability to code intelligent tatics. An impossible shot is an impossible shot of course, but lightning fast reflexes do not make for an impossible to beat game.
"And yes, I know it's been a damn long time since arcade games cost a quarter, but I'm a child of the 80's :-)"
That's true, nodays the coin slots are mostly just for looks. After all, why bother charging yourself a quarter? And it's not like there are Arcades anymore.
That would depend on how the game actually goes about determining you suck and adjusting it's gameplay.
Let me give you a clue, being AI does not exclude and will certainly include analyzing statistics and responding by adjusting variables. The minute analyzing comes into play and it's something artificial doing it, THAT IS AI. Whether it's very bright or not is irrelevant. I know human beings that aren't as intelligent as Splinter Cell.
I do however believe that thanks to people like you, NOTHING will ever be entirely acknowledged as "TRUE" AI, even if it were identical in function to the human brain and perfectly recreated the chemical reactions and responses we call emotions, morals, feelings, 6th sense, etc.
"that is getting impossible to win if you are too good?"
The idea is that the difficulty should scale. Thus an uber player should be equally challenged as a first time player who has barely figured out the controls.
For you who is becoming a better player the game shouldn't get easier as you become more skilled, however it shouldn't be harder for you to win either, rather it should remain equally challenging. No this doesn't serve if your the type who likes to show his friends what a bad arse you are because you can wail through a game.
When it comes to video and music a digital stream which is not absolutely perfect is absolute trash.
Any interference whatsoever in music for instance causes gaps and silent pauses where equal interference on radio causes a slight bit of noise which you might not even notice.
The same with video, poor reception, big black bars and black screens or stutters, rather than a slightly fuzzy but perfectly watchable uninterrupted viewing.
You wouldn't, you'd buy Xgrid. It's simple math and microsoft certainly figured it out a long time ago. The markup on a piece of software is anywhere from let's see, $200 divided by $0.15, what does that come out to? Or you could sell the equivelent in hardware, $200 divided by $150. And for some odd reason you can easily manage to sell the software orders of magnitude more times than you'd manage to sell the hardware.
Gee, I wonder.
Making it Mac only will ensure that nobody ever knows about it.
Man I feel old, I remember when everyone used pc's but everybody knew what a mac was. Nobody however had heard of linux. Nowdays everyone still uses a pc, nobody knows what the hell a mac is, but everybody has heard of linux.
The difference? Mac's run on macs, everybody uses pc's.
64mb of RAM is oodles? wouldn't oodles be somewhere more in the ballpark of 1gb+? 64mb of ram is barely sufficient to run win98, let alone MacOS which prior to OSX lacked any reasonable form of swap without third party software.
The result was constantly running out of memory. And since pretty much everyone running on a mac requires lots of ram you'd run out of memory fairly quickly, often with no more than two or three applications running.
As for the sluggishness of 72pin RAM, I can only assume your joking, EDO ram was static memory and smoked compared to dynamic memories. Dynamic memory technology was cheaper, has bigger numbers (amusing that the faster it is, the more it needs rewritten and therefore the more it bogs down the processor and the more wait states while it refreshes). Static technology gets expensive when you talk anything much more than 128mb, while dynamic is cheap to 1-2gb.
Between processor bog and additional wait states and the fact these problems scale to the speed of the memory, it's highly debatable whether dynamic is overall superior to static. However saying that static memory is sluggish is insane.
Mozilla is resident in memory WHEN your actually running Mozilla, just like anything else. The mozilla quicklaunch would qualify as a "memory resident" application because it is ALWAYS running in memory.
Internet Explorer IS however a memory resident application, one you cannot remove and has a bigger footprint than Mozilla whilst DOING less.
iTunes was NOT and IS NOT as permissive as it gets, as permissive as it gets is no DRM. If the RIAA won't stop until they actually go bust, the answer is for us to not stop until they go bust either. It's not like their existance is beneficial in some way.
Now that's it's broken the media companies may push a more restrictive system, and then that system will be broken as well and so on and so forth until they do go bust or give up.
Hardware based DRM may or may not be pushed through, it faces some serious oposition from alot of big business as well as little guy players. The hardware manufacturers don't want to do it, and the RIAA will be in for a fight when it fights the likes of Dell, IBM, Apple who have some serious lobbying power and lots of money in their pockets.
If it is pushed through there will be a black market and contraband, music will STILL be pirated and nonpirated versions will be out. There will cracks to bypass the hardware DRM as well. It's not as if their techs are brighter than the rest of the world you know. Their technical capabilities do not exceed those of the hackers and crackers of the world united, trying to restrict copying via technical measures is a losing battle.
Eventually they will wither away or accept that they must protect their copyrights with the law and not technology, thier attempts at vigilante technological enforcement will fail, just like those of every other copyright holder who has walked that street and just like all their attempts to date.
It is NOT inevitable they will win.
What the hell are you talking about? Mozilla is open source, it's not produced by one company, and it has nothing to do with windows.
New releases are out about once a month and you can always download the cutting edge version that has a fix before as soon as it's fixed.
Furthermore since it is open source, you don't have to wait for anyone else to fix a problem. If it's worth it to you, you can fix the problem yourself.
Think about that for a minute. Would you want poor linux to have to spend half his day denying microsoft patches?