Fun, one month ago a friend presented his thesis to the jury.
Thesis is a learning system for game NPCs. He used Team Fortress Capture the flag, one specific map, and trained his 4 bots against FoxBot and another bot which name i don't remember.
After some training, he gathered 4 human players, and made them play against the 3 bot teams (not saying which was which bot, of course !). Results? Human players found his bots were the most realistic and surprising to play with (not the hardest).
Hopefully he'll eventually work in AI for games (that's what his thesis is about, after all !), and make great things.
OMG, i'm not the only one to remember that combo sooooo many years after last playing O.o
was Air-something, right? don't even remember the name lol (horizontal shoot-em-up, on some console)
Guess there's an opportunity to make money by supplying many servers to cope with/. load!
New business plan:
* post a privateer story on/.
* wait for servers to melt on the load
* come in your ship filled with additional hardware
* PROFIT!
Seems to me it's easier to move around some thousand handhelds computers than 6 * same number of textbooks (assuming 6 textbooks to cover a nice range of subjects).
And you can (probably) use the handheld to annotate books and such.
Also it's easier for a child to carry a handheld to school than 6 textbooks, or store that in the school.
Disclaimer: this are some arguments i just thought of, maybe they are baseless:)
They mention Google digitized books, but they could also grab content from http://www.wikipedia.org/ - after all, that's what GFDL is for!
Ok, some will argue quality / neutrality / completeness isn't guaranteed on all articles - i'll say it's better'an nothing [and biaises exist in every material / textbook]
It's just that they don't know the logic behind using the mouse, the folders, they don't know the concept of buttons to click, and so on.
My grandfather recently bought a laptop to be able to send mails. The first time i helped him use it, i realized he has no idea you could click a button. Because it's far from obvious if you don't know.
Of course it's easy & obvious for us. But we forget it's the result of our experience, of learning, because for some we've been in the computer field so long we don't remember learning. Or we were born with a mouse in the hand (left or right, btw?), so we never really learned...
Either way, try to do stuff you have no clue about - servicing your car's motor? You should realize you have no clue about how to do it - because you don't know, not because you can't learn.
Actually, you can use the History of an article, and pick a specific version. You then have the guarantee to always refer to this version, not the current one.
I'm a contributor on fr:, and there are *many* ways to contribute, even if it's not your field of expertise.
You can: * correct typos * reformulate obscure sentences * fix invalid links (ie correct [[SlashDot]] => [[Slashdot]] * translate articles from other languages (i translated from en: the history of a country i didn't even know:)) * send patches for the software, MediaWiki
In 2000, a hacker named Vitek Boden broke into the computers of an Australian sewage plant and leaked raw effluent into rivers and parks, killing fish but no people.
But why, in the first place, did those computers have outside access? Or rather, entry points.
If a computer is controlling a really important piece of hardware (nuclear plant, anyone?), I sure hope it is NOT connected to ANY outside network, for whatever reason. And if it is, the one who decided it was a good idea should be held responsible for whatever happens, and lose his job, get a big fine that will make sure he will NOT EVER make the same mistake... Maybe this way security will be a level higher.
I'm contributing to Wikipedia, and we have some ways to deal with vandalism. We weren't (yet !) victims of determined spammers with bots, so it's theoritical, but here are things we can use:
first, all changes appear in a special page, so anyone can see them, and switch back to a previous version in history. Anyone can in one click see differences with the previous version
all contributions of users (anonymous or not) are easily viewable by anyone, thus cleaning after finding a spammer is made easier
sysops (contributors with some maintenance rights) can revert last changes of anonymous users in a few clicks
sysops can delete pages (to clear new pages created by bots, in this case)
sysops can block IPs if needed, preventing the edition of pages from those IPs
sysops can also block usernames
sysops can protect pages, preventing any edition (to protect main page for instance, in case of repeated vandalism)
worse case, a filter can be added to the computer's firewall settings.
And, given the number of contributors and sysops, it's almost certain there's a sysop nearby at any time. Of course, if spammers attack from 50 IPs, one sysop alone will have a hard time to fight & clean the mess:)
Announced at the 2003 Professional Developers Conference, Microsoft Windows Code-Named "Longhorn" is
the the next version of the Windows operating system.
Look here:
3rd paragraph
And i think the subs on the DVD say that, too... And that's what I hear when i listen, or what i think i sang during some karaoke in Japan:)
Slashdot Mirror
will it finally be able to tell us when Duke Nukem Forever will be release?
Fun, one month ago a friend presented his thesis to the jury.
Thesis is a learning system for game NPCs. He used Team Fortress Capture the flag, one specific map, and trained his 4 bots against FoxBot and another bot which name i don't remember.
After some training, he gathered 4 human players, and made them play against the 3 bot teams (not saying which was which bot, of course !). Results? Human players found his bots were the most realistic and surprising to play with (not the hardest).
Hopefully he'll eventually work in AI for games (that's what his thesis is about, after all !), and make great things.
OMG, i'm not the only one to remember that combo sooooo many years after last playing O.o
was Air-something, right? don't even remember the name lol (horizontal shoot-em-up, on some console)
Microsoft already reacted, by putting a big ad on the article :)
Oops, of course it should read towards you...
... that nasty, inflammatory mail towards i appear to have sent is the result of my coughing! The mail reader thought i was composing a mail!
It may mean project development stalls (as developers argue about what to do before forking), wasted efforts, interoperability issues, and so on...
Guess there's an opportunity to make money by supplying many servers to cope with /. load!
/.
New business plan:
* post a privateer story on
* wait for servers to melt on the load
* come in your ship filled with additional hardware
* PROFIT!
Seems to me it's easier to move around some thousand handhelds computers than 6 * same number of textbooks (assuming 6 textbooks to cover a nice range of subjects).
:)
And you can (probably) use the handheld to annotate books and such.
Also it's easier for a child to carry a handheld to school than 6 textbooks, or store that in the school.
Disclaimer: this are some arguments i just thought of, maybe they are baseless
I'd say they refer to the total number of books Google will digitise. Seems to be the total number of books in Harvard, for instance.
They mention Google digitized books, but they could also grab content from http://www.wikipedia.org/ - after all, that's what GFDL is for!
Ok, some will argue quality / neutrality / completeness isn't guaranteed on all articles - i'll say it's better'an nothing [and biaises exist in every material / textbook]
+5 insightful.
The trouble is not that they can't learn, imo.
It's just that they don't know the logic behind using the mouse, the folders, they don't know the concept of buttons to click, and so on.
My grandfather recently bought a laptop to be able to send mails. The first time i helped him use it, i realized he has no idea you could click a button. Because it's far from obvious if you don't know.
Of course it's easy & obvious for us. But we forget it's the result of our experience, of learning, because for some we've been in the computer field so long we don't remember learning. Or we were born with a mouse in the hand (left or right, btw?), so we never really learned...
Either way, try to do stuff you have no clue about - servicing your car's motor? You should realize you have no clue about how to do it - because you don't know, not because you can't learn.
Actually, you can use the History of an article, and pick a specific version. You then have the guarantee to always refer to this version, not the current one.
There are plans for DVD versions. There are even WikiReader, german (for now) printed versions of some articles, sold for a low price.
As there are >100 languages & databases, and (afaik) no central counter, pretty hard to know, unfortunately :)
Probably a stub, but who really cares? Stubs can grow pretty fast sometimes.
I'm a contributor on fr:, and there are *many* ways to contribute, even if it's not your field of expertise.
:))
You can:
* correct typos
* reformulate obscure sentences
* fix invalid links (ie correct [[SlashDot]] => [[Slashdot]]
* translate articles from other languages (i translated from en: the history of a country i didn't even know
* send patches for the software, MediaWiki
But why, in the first place, did those computers have outside access? Or rather, entry points.
If a computer is controlling a really important piece of hardware (nuclear plant, anyone?), I sure hope it is NOT connected to ANY outside network, for whatever reason. And if it is, the one who decided it was a good idea should be held responsible for whatever happens, and lose his job, get a big fine that will make sure he will NOT EVER make the same mistake... Maybe this way security will be a level higher.
And, given the number of contributors and sysops, it's almost certain there's a sysop nearby at any time. Of course, if spammers attack from 50 IPs, one sysop alone will have a hard time to fight & clean the mess
(emphasis mine)
Look here: 3rd paragraph :)
And i think the subs on the DVD say that, too... And that's what I hear when i listen, or what i think i sang during some karaoke in Japan
Yes, yes, offtopic...
... the energy required to pressurize the water?
Is it more or less the electricity produced by that method?
Of course you can always build underwater and take advantage of gravity to make water flow through your channels...
Guess we can also always get back to getting water in the well to wash, err, power out electronic devices!
Sorry, but 404 is page not found. DNS lookup failure is another error (don't know it on top of my head).