If all a computer can be is logic, I wonder if anyone has found a way to force a shutdown loop, to do something so illogical the computer can not continue.
This isn't Star Trek. What you suggest is impossible because the chess computer is not trying to guess what the other person is doing or interpret the moves on the board in any other way. It is simply solving a heuristic function based on the positions of the pieces on the board, and the output of that function is the computer's next move.
Agreed. I don't put much stock in these much-touted computer chess programs beating Kasparov and the like, because the computers are allowed to effectively cheat by having massive databases of chess moves on file, and using them they can simply copy the strategy and tactics thought up by other humans. And that is how they win.
I imagine that if you took Hydra or Deep Blue's game databases away, they would in fact perform very poorly.
Here in the US, both rating systems seem pretty useless regardless of whether parents understand them, anyway.
The last G-rated movie I saw (which was put out by Disney, no less), was full of plot elements and jokes to which I would most certainly not like to expose my 6-year-old, if I had one. And I'm not exactly one of those people you'd throw in the "moral conservative" camp.
I imagine that there's no open-source DGPS software because equipment that can receive a DGPS signal already has the firmware for decoding it built in. Why bother?
If what you're talking about is free DGPS service, that does exist, but only in certain localities. UW-Madison has set up several beacons and differential transmitters around Madison, WI, and they are free for anyone to use. I believe that the Ohio Department of Transportation has done a similar thing for the entire state, but I'm not sure if they let the public use it or not.
Yeah, but most GPS equipment of that grade falls into the "If you have to ask how much it costs, you can't afford it" price range.
The system I work with can do sub-meter, sub centimeter with post-process. It retails for ~$40,000 plus a couple thou for a DGPS subscription and a few hundred to a couple thou for the DMI (odometer) equipment. And its precision falls off sharply (to as bad as 5 meters) in metropolitan areas where you get the GPS signal getting blocked by and bouncing off of tall buildings.
My guess would be that this system is sort of the opposite - a relatively cheap solution that works well when you don't need incredible accuracy , and it probably works best in dense urban areas where GPS tends to perform the worst.
That said, I'm not entirely sure how big their market is, because I imagine most people that need positioning equipment and work exclusively in areas with good wireless coverage are probably the type of customers who can afford expensive GPS equipment.
Why isn't anyone clamoring for a law against pork? It has to be one of the baldest rapes of democracy going, but nobody seems to care when it isn't being used to pass a law that they don't like.
I have an old Toshiba 320CDT (Pentium-233) that is dead quiet if you go into the BIOS and put it into "quiet mode." In that mode, rather than turning on the CPU fan it drops the CPU to 33mhz when the core starts to heat up.
On the contrary, I wouldn't be surprised if b&w film and paper outlasts color. Kodak may not be turning a profit on it, but that's because most everyone in the b&w photography community (that I've met anyway) prefers just about anyone else over The Great Yellow Father, and nobody else uses b&w, except for maybe that stuff that you can process at your local 1-hour photo shop (I think they call it Black-and-White Plus).
Color could easily be superseded by digital because very few color photographers that I've met really care much about developing their own photos - it is very labor intensive and difficult because you can't use a red light in the darkroom, getting the color balance right is tricky, etc. Any touch-up work you do is much easier to handle on Photoshop than it is in the darkroom, and, at least in my experience, color darkroom work isn't even very fun.
On the other hand, black and white darkroom work is very enjoyable, and it isn't too hard to get the basics of b&w darkroom work down. It's fun to work with your hands, and there are all sorts of things you can do in the darkroom that just don't come out as well in Photoshop. I still enjoy 35mm b&w photography quite a bit, and using the b&w feature on my digital camera doesn't even come close and doesn't produce nearly as nice of results, either. (Those CCDs are quite obviously tuned for capturing color.)
On the other hand, the reason that glass is resistant to crystallisation in microgravity is because of the way the liquid glass flows in the presence of gravity.
The article doesn't make it clear whether this property is unique to glasses, or whether it is normal for any molten material. It could be that semiconductor materal still does crystallize much more easily in microgravity.
Land ownership will be handled the way land ownership has always been handled. It all boils down to two simple rules:
1. Whoever was there first gets to have it. 2. Should anybody else show up wanting it, whoever shows the greatest sustained military strength gets to have it.
I doubt it can possibly turn out any other way, at least not with the USA involved. Keep in mind the USA is the one that's working hard at putting weapons in space, and that the USA is talking about mining celestial bodies sometime in the near future. History makes it pretty clear that when you get Americans, resource interests, and weapons together in one place, but there is already someone else at that place, you can be sure that an application of Rule #2 is coming soon.
On a related twist, seperating the browser and operating system will hurt the Microsoft brand as a whole.
This is exactly why they need to be separate. Microsoft is, for all intents and purposes, a monopoly. A monopoly that controls more than one market and is working hard at taking over a few others. Monopolies are bad for markets. Being a Monopoly, Microsoft should be broken up or knocked off of its perch for the sake of the economy's long-term health.
That said, your observation is true, and this is why neither Apple nor Microsoft would ever break up their respective platforms of their own will without a massive change of business plan - which is rare in companies that large.
Personally, I think that every energy solution based on using 'cleaner' energy that I've heard of is at best too little too late, and at worst a simple case of whistling in the dark. If the world's energy usage continues to skyrocket the way it is, closing all the coal fired power plants in the world and installing the best scrubbers and catalytic converters and such on every other fossil fuel burning device is only going to put us a decade or two behind the current curve. Heck, I think that the entire idea of "clean energy" is a refuge for people who haven't considered the laws of thermodynamics and people who tend to tunnel-vision on only a few types of pollution. Even windmills will alter the planet's climate if you put up enough of them.
Really, the solution is to get people to quit using so @$%@$ much energy in the first place. Until we give up our need to have large houses with big, manicured lawns, motorized private transportation, having more than two children, and individually wrapped disposable everything, we're going to have to live with the possibility that we or our descendants are going to end up living on a planet that's not fit for supporting human life anymore.
As much as I like NEXTSTEP, I'm not sure you can really consider it a success story. I wasn't using NeXT machines back when the company was still in business, but, given that they have been long gone, it would take more than the knowledge that they straddled architectures (and architecture philosophies) to convince me that their adoption of x86, Sparc, etc. was a good decision.
I think all of us late '90s and on BeOS users understand first hand why it would be a Bad Idea for Apple to find themselves straddling an endianness divide.
On BeOS, it was a constant annoyance to find that xxx cool program was only available to BeOS PPC users or BeOS x86 users because the author of the package didn't write code that works on both big endian and little endian machines. BeOS may not have been hurt too badly from it because most of its users were geeks who were willing to try an altOS anyway, but I seriously doubt that Apple users would handle the problem charitably. A great many wouldn't be able to understand the problem beyond the "Damn it, I just spent good money on this app that says it runs on MacOS but won't run because I have a CPU! What the FUCK is wrong with Apple!?" level.
The interesting thing about computer image analysis is that it is roughly broken into two camps - machine vision and computer vision. In general, machine vision people aren't as likely to consider what they do to be A.I. - rather, it's more of a devilishly difficult (at times) form of pattern classification, and the methods are often based more on rote statistical methods than anything else. Also, industrial applications generally don't incorporate any sort of learning other than possibly the original evolution of the firmware back in the design shop.
The A.I. stuff shows up in robotics competitions and journals, but there are two things working against computer vision in industrial applications. The first is that using true A.I. is expensive stuff, and if you're just looking for something that can sort widgets or detect tumors in CAT scans, you're going to look for the cheaper option if you're choosing between a glorified math equation and a complex 'thinking machine', especially when nowadays there isn't much difference between their performance except when dealing with truly novel input. The second is that the most intelligent machine we know of (us) has a habit of being rather unpredictable, and this quality is generally considered to be a Bad Thing when you're looking to buy a machine.
I guess that this distinction is heavily dependent on your definition of A.I., but I think most industrial vision applications as being similar to Deep Blue - they are really just horribly complicated equation solvers that get some help from a few heuristics and a database of examples. But the fact of the matter is that Deep Blue is vastly more successful than any chess programs that try to actually think. I also think that's a perfectly reasonable situation - AI is at its heart a field that is groping in the dark, because we don't really know what intelligence is just yet, and when you're trying to solve a problem it's much wiser to take an approach where you actually know what you're doing.
It's also worth pointing out that the two providers you mentioned, Sprint and Cingular, are both poor providers for rural areas. I live in a reasonably sized metropolitan area (Madison, WI), but my Cingular signal is frequently gone before I've hit the county line if I'm not following the Interstate. I also have a Sprint company phone while I'm on the road, and the situation is even worse - the only reason why Sprint PCS can claim a bigger coverage map than most GSM networks is that, being TDMA (I think), they have the option of using most anyone's towers for roaming service.
And, as the parent mentioned, the sales people (and the coverage maps) exaggerate the coverage greatly. My signal is usually gone long before I've come anywhere near the edges of the spots they've colored in on the map in the sales brochure.
If you live that far out, don't even think about signing a contract before you've had a friend who gets their cellular service from the provider you're considering over to your house to see how good the signal is. And do it on a few different days, because weather conditions like cloud cover can have a large impact on the range of a cell tower.
That's really the crux of the situation, too. All the anecdote I have heard suggests that there is no good metric for comparing Unix marketshare to Windows marketshare if you're looking at how much of the IT workload is being done by each. Anything else starts to rapidly and artificially skew thinks in Windows's favor - Linux and *BSD aside, your average Unix server certainly carries a hefty price tag compared to a Windows one. On top of that, it seems like there is a Windows culture of buying different computers for different services and letting computrons go wasted rather than having one machine manage several services. On top of that, I have heard plenty of anecdote that suggests that where a single Unix server will do, you may need a cluster of Windows machines.
Besides, all of those metrics really obscure the real issue compared to just measuring sales. Free Software aside, more money spent on a platform means more revenue for the vendor of that platform, which means more R&D goes into that platform, which means that that platform pulls ahead in the feature race. And we all know that when it comes to making critical business decisions, we all know that they are all determined by solving the equation
value = number of bullet points on the sales brochure / price tag
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If all a computer can be is logic, I wonder if anyone has found a way to force a shutdown loop, to do something so illogical the computer can not continue.
This isn't Star Trek. What you suggest is impossible because the chess computer is not trying to guess what the other person is doing or interpret the moves on the board in any other way. It is simply solving a heuristic function based on the positions of the pieces on the board, and the output of that function is the computer's next move.
Agreed. I don't put much stock in these much-touted computer chess programs beating Kasparov and the like, because the computers are allowed to effectively cheat by having massive databases of chess moves on file, and using them they can simply copy the strategy and tactics thought up by other humans. And that is how they win.
I imagine that if you took Hydra or Deep Blue's game databases away, they would in fact perform very poorly.
Here in the US, both rating systems seem pretty useless regardless of whether parents understand them, anyway.
The last G-rated movie I saw (which was put out by Disney, no less), was full of plot elements and jokes to which I would most certainly not like to expose my 6-year-old, if I had one. And I'm not exactly one of those people you'd throw in the "moral conservative" camp.
Even streaking gets you on the sex offender list if you're convicted of it.
Aleph-null bottles of beer on the wall
Aleph-null bottles of beer
Take one down, pass it around
Aleph-null bottles of beer on the wall
I think if we accounted for each, the numbers would be something along the lines of:
70% download ilegally
90% download legally
100% rip CDs legally
100% copy friends' ripped CDs ilegally
1,536% think statisticians do lead paint shots when nobody's looking.
I imagine that there's no open-source DGPS software because equipment that can receive a DGPS signal already has the firmware for decoding it built in. Why bother?
If what you're talking about is free DGPS service, that does exist, but only in certain localities. UW-Madison has set up several beacons and differential transmitters around Madison, WI, and they are free for anyone to use. I believe that the Ohio Department of Transportation has done a similar thing for the entire state, but I'm not sure if they let the public use it or not.
Yeah, but most GPS equipment of that grade falls into the "If you have to ask how much it costs, you can't afford it" price range.
The system I work with can do sub-meter, sub centimeter with post-process. It retails for ~$40,000 plus a couple thou for a DGPS subscription and a few hundred to a couple thou for the DMI (odometer) equipment. And its precision falls off sharply (to as bad as 5 meters) in metropolitan areas where you get the GPS signal getting blocked by and bouncing off of tall buildings.
My guess would be that this system is sort of the opposite - a relatively cheap solution that works well when you don't need incredible accuracy , and it probably works best in dense urban areas where GPS tends to perform the worst.
That said, I'm not entirely sure how big their market is, because I imagine most people that need positioning equipment and work exclusively in areas with good wireless coverage are probably the type of customers who can afford expensive GPS equipment.
Why isn't anyone clamoring for a law against pork? It has to be one of the baldest rapes of democracy going, but nobody seems to care when it isn't being used to pass a law that they don't like.
I have an old Toshiba 320CDT (Pentium-233) that is dead quiet if you go into the BIOS and put it into "quiet mode." In that mode, rather than turning on the CPU fan it drops the CPU to 33mhz when the core starts to heat up.
I do. That was the unstated basis of my argument.
On the contrary, I wouldn't be surprised if b&w film and paper outlasts color. Kodak may not be turning a profit on it, but that's because most everyone in the b&w photography community (that I've met anyway) prefers just about anyone else over The Great Yellow Father, and nobody else uses b&w, except for maybe that stuff that you can process at your local 1-hour photo shop (I think they call it Black-and-White Plus).
Color could easily be superseded by digital because very few color photographers that I've met really care much about developing their own photos - it is very labor intensive and difficult because you can't use a red light in the darkroom, getting the color balance right is tricky, etc. Any touch-up work you do is much easier to handle on Photoshop than it is in the darkroom, and, at least in my experience, color darkroom work isn't even very fun.
On the other hand, black and white darkroom work is very enjoyable, and it isn't too hard to get the basics of b&w darkroom work down. It's fun to work with your hands, and there are all sorts of things you can do in the darkroom that just don't come out as well in Photoshop. I still enjoy 35mm b&w photography quite a bit, and using the b&w feature on my digital camera doesn't even come close and doesn't produce nearly as nice of results, either. (Those CCDs are quite obviously tuned for capturing color.)
On the other hand, the reason that glass is resistant to crystallisation in microgravity is because of the way the liquid glass flows in the presence of gravity.
The article doesn't make it clear whether this property is unique to glasses, or whether it is normal for any molten material. It could be that semiconductor materal still does crystallize much more easily in microgravity.
If only you didn't need an OS to run the web browser on.
Technically, you don't.
Three words: conservation of energy.
We'll get truly clean energy the same day we develop perpetual motion machines.
Land ownership will be handled the way land ownership has always been handled. It all boils down to two simple rules:
1. Whoever was there first gets to have it.
2. Should anybody else show up wanting it, whoever shows the greatest sustained military strength gets to have it.
I doubt it can possibly turn out any other way, at least not with the USA involved. Keep in mind the USA is the one that's working hard at putting weapons in space, and that the USA is talking about mining celestial bodies sometime in the near future. History makes it pretty clear that when you get Americans, resource interests, and weapons together in one place, but there is already someone else at that place, you can be sure that an application of Rule #2 is coming soon.
On a related twist, seperating the browser and operating system will hurt the Microsoft brand as a whole.
This is exactly why they need to be separate. Microsoft is, for all intents and purposes, a monopoly. A monopoly that controls more than one market and is working hard at taking over a few others. Monopolies are bad for markets. Being a Monopoly, Microsoft should be broken up or knocked off of its perch for the sake of the economy's long-term health.
That said, your observation is true, and this is why neither Apple nor Microsoft would ever break up their respective platforms of their own will without a massive change of business plan - which is rare in companies that large.
Personally, I think that every energy solution based on using 'cleaner' energy that I've heard of is at best too little too late, and at worst a simple case of whistling in the dark. If the world's energy usage continues to skyrocket the way it is, closing all the coal fired power plants in the world and installing the best scrubbers and catalytic converters and such on every other fossil fuel burning device is only going to put us a decade or two behind the current curve. Heck, I think that the entire idea of "clean energy" is a refuge for people who haven't considered the laws of thermodynamics and people who tend to tunnel-vision on only a few types of pollution. Even windmills will alter the planet's climate if you put up enough of them.
Really, the solution is to get people to quit using so @$%@$ much energy in the first place. Until we give up our need to have large houses with big, manicured lawns, motorized private transportation, having more than two children, and individually wrapped disposable everything, we're going to have to live with the possibility that we or our descendants are going to end up living on a planet that's not fit for supporting human life anymore.
Umm. . . because it creates an unneeded extra step?
That said, it shouldn't be too hard to make a Blender plug-in that exports MD2 files.
As much as I like NEXTSTEP, I'm not sure you can really consider it a success story. I wasn't using NeXT machines back when the company was still in business, but, given that they have been long gone, it would take more than the knowledge that they straddled architectures (and architecture philosophies) to convince me that their adoption of x86, Sparc, etc. was a good decision.
I think all of us late '90s and on BeOS users understand first hand why it would be a Bad Idea for Apple to find themselves straddling an endianness divide.
On BeOS, it was a constant annoyance to find that xxx cool program was only available to BeOS PPC users or BeOS x86 users because the author of the package didn't write code that works on both big endian and little endian machines. BeOS may not have been hurt too badly from it because most of its users were geeks who were willing to try an altOS anyway, but I seriously doubt that Apple users would handle the problem charitably. A great many wouldn't be able to understand the problem beyond the "Damn it, I just spent good money on this app that says it runs on MacOS but won't run because I have a CPU! What the FUCK is wrong with Apple!?" level.
The interesting thing about computer image analysis is that it is roughly broken into two camps - machine vision and computer vision. In general, machine vision people aren't as likely to consider what they do to be A.I. - rather, it's more of a devilishly difficult (at times) form of pattern classification, and the methods are often based more on rote statistical methods than anything else. Also, industrial applications generally don't incorporate any sort of learning other than possibly the original evolution of the firmware back in the design shop.
The A.I. stuff shows up in robotics competitions and journals, but there are two things working against computer vision in industrial applications. The first is that using true A.I. is expensive stuff, and if you're just looking for something that can sort widgets or detect tumors in CAT scans, you're going to look for the cheaper option if you're choosing between a glorified math equation and a complex 'thinking machine', especially when nowadays there isn't much difference between their performance except when dealing with truly novel input. The second is that the most intelligent machine we know of (us) has a habit of being rather unpredictable, and this quality is generally considered to be a Bad Thing when you're looking to buy a machine.
I guess that this distinction is heavily dependent on your definition of A.I., but I think most industrial vision applications as being similar to Deep Blue - they are really just horribly complicated equation solvers that get some help from a few heuristics and a database of examples. But the fact of the matter is that Deep Blue is vastly more successful than any chess programs that try to actually think. I also think that's a perfectly reasonable situation - AI is at its heart a field that is groping in the dark, because we don't really know what intelligence is just yet, and when you're trying to solve a problem it's much wiser to take an approach where you actually know what you're doing.
Personally, I can't think of a more legitimate use for wget than pr0n.
It's also worth pointing out that the two providers you mentioned, Sprint and Cingular, are both poor providers for rural areas. I live in a reasonably sized metropolitan area (Madison, WI), but my Cingular signal is frequently gone before I've hit the county line if I'm not following the Interstate. I also have a Sprint company phone while I'm on the road, and the situation is even worse - the only reason why Sprint PCS can claim a bigger coverage map than most GSM networks is that, being TDMA (I think), they have the option of using most anyone's towers for roaming service.
And, as the parent mentioned, the sales people (and the coverage maps) exaggerate the coverage greatly. My signal is usually gone long before I've come anywhere near the edges of the spots they've colored in on the map in the sales brochure.
If you live that far out, don't even think about signing a contract before you've had a friend who gets their cellular service from the provider you're considering over to your house to see how good the signal is. And do it on a few different days, because weather conditions like cloud cover can have a large impact on the range of a cell tower.
Besides, all of those metrics really obscure the real issue compared to just measuring sales. Free Software aside, more money spent on a platform means more revenue for the vendor of that platform, which means more R&D goes into that platform, which means that that platform pulls ahead in the feature race. And we all know that when it comes to making critical business decisions, we all know that they are all determined by solving the equation