I'm currently on page 241 of that book. I read a chapter every night, because I want to advance in poker. I play some friendly brick and mortar games with some buddies every now and then. Put a fiver in at the beginning of the evening, holdem 5 and 10 cent blinds. So fun. Last time I doubled my money:) I actually didn't know poker was recently becoming more popular, but apparently, it is.
I agree with using that book to start programming: I'm an ICT student and hobbyist programmer myself, and I've played with the idea to just make a poker bot based on what Sklansky writes in this book. I was planning to use Bayes' theorem especially. Add all different factors together (position, early round bets, other player betting history, pot size, possible opponent hands, other player bluffing history, etc etc etc) to decide between call/check/bet/fold. Of course card counting is out of the question: it is completely useless as the deck should be shuffled between every hand, moreover the computer has a big advantage over humans in this area, so it wouldn't at all be hard to make a card counting bot. (remembering your opponent's actions is something good poker players do, count cards they do not)
Too bad I've got exams (one more week to go), else I would have started already:)
"Potential uses for the property: a religious college, spa, golf resort or even a technology park."
Falls under the category of 'religious college' perhaps, but how about a sect HQ? Hare Krishna, Scientology, Wu Manchu, The Stonecutters Lodge, etc.
Funding is also not a problem. Most big sects already have enough ties with big industials, criminal syndicats and Hollywood stars to get their hands on enough money to buy the Biosphere.
Or what about evil masterminds? Doctor Papa could finally get a pied-a-terre in the USA!
In fact it's an iron crystal, enlarged 165 (some sources say 150, some say 160, some say 165) billion times. The 9 orbs each represent an iron atom. So it's actually the world's largest ircon crystal, not atom.
Actually it's "Manneke Pis", not mannequin:) Manneke is literally 'little man' or 'small man'. The postfix 'ke' is dialect for 'tje' (so undialected it is 'Mannetje pis'), which is a diminutive, and it doesn't exist in English. Basically you put 'small' or 'little' in front of the translated word to get the same effect, but it doesn't feel the same. 'Manneke pis' means 'little man piss', so you weren't off by much when you think it is 'man that can piss'.
Nice to see that people on/. appreciate our food and culture:)
Errr...I don't use Linux (yes, mod me down to whatever u want and don't read on if you must) but why not make a system-wide change: left-click select puts the selection into the clipboard, selecting text with the right mouse button doesn't. Simple. This way the user can choose whether he wants to select-to-copy (left) or select-to-delete (right).
If it's already in the thread, sorry, I only searched the first page and didn't find my suggestion. So why didn't anyone think of this earlier? I don't see any disadvantages...
I agree. Last Christmas I asked for Settlers Of Catan (the basic 3-4 players box) and I've never regretted it. It's quite an expensive game, and some of the pieces (all the roads) were missing right at the start (factory screw-up?) but the very friendly people of 999games sent me the pieces, I had to wait 2 months but it was worth the wait.
Me, my girlfriend, my brother and his girlfriend regularly play a game of Catan and it's always fun. It takes some time before you get a good insight in the game mechanics, but as soon as you develop some tactics it gets more and more fun every time.
What is especially intriguing about the game mechanics is the balance between luck and tactics. You need to understand the bell curve for 2d6, and the factor of luck is almost totally out of the equation. If you haven't played it yet, try the Java online version of Catan or find a copy of the cheap but crappy CD-ROM version in Dutch (I think the original was German, so you might find that on CDROM too), details here.
Ooh I've had this with many games:
-Back in the day when I played a lot of Counter-Strike, I regularly *thought* I heard someone saying "Bomb has been planted".
-In the period I played through Half-Life I sometimes heard the hound-eye barking sound while sitting at home watching tv.
-I've watched the Half-Life 2 preview movies so often that I started to take on G-man type speech. Not on purpose. I would go like: "Hasssss anyone touched... my computer while I... wasssss absssent?" Well, not as distinct of course. Just stretching my s a bit longer than normal, and pausing my sentence sometimes.
If I had any modpoints I'd mod you up, but I don't so I'll reward you for your insight with a reply. I hate it when people say they hate Microsoft. As you say, it's ok to hate the company but whining about it won't help. A few days ago, when the sasser worm news was on/. people were complaining that warezed versions of Windows XP are to blame, because they're the most likely to not have any security patches installed, and thus help spread the worm. Now Microsoft fixes this (4 days after it's been brought up on slashdot as an 'idea'!!), and people start cracking jokes and saying that it's useless etc etc. I just can't bend my head around this...(yeah I must be new here:p )
In theory, they could get way more than 15kb/sec. There's always numerous sattellites within range, so connectivity and bandwidth shouldn't be a problem. Problem is, I don't think they can use commercial satellites, because their communications are supposed to be secret. NASA doesn't want people eavesdropping:)
I always wondered why Half-Life had these 'bot' skins, as seen here. I've been playing HL since 1998 and I've never understood why these skins are in, they're not even skins of characters in the single-player game, and all the other skins are. Then I read somewhere that those skins were made for the German version of the game, where the human Grunts (army soldiers, there to shut you up for good, yadda yadda) are replaced by robots gone totally friggin mad 0MGz0r! Talk about killing the story-line of the game... I also believe that scientists couldn't be killed by the player. You can always let them stand under an automatic door and let them get squished when it closes. ent_scientist1 was killed by func_door (or something):)
What you could do is just make 1:1 images of your cd-roms and store them on your HD, then use Alcohol 120% or some other software to mount the image on a virtual cd-rom drive instead of putting the cd-rom in your physical cd-rom drive. It would consume alot of space on your HD, but perhaps it's not a bad idea, considering that it's always good to have back-ups of your precious expensive store-bought software;) Most if not all cd-rom checks can be cracked, and most if not all copy-protections can be circumvented using the right tools. Blind-read and blind-write are good, and so is Alcohol 120% or CloneCD.
It sounds logical but perhaps it isn't: if you open a web-page with two frames, one for http://slashdot.org and one for http://www.google.com, then both webservers see your IP as the requester right? So far I believe I'm right. But if http://slashdot.org has two frames, one with src=http://www.google.com and the other with src=index.html then google sees the referer for that hit as http://slashdot.org, because the page was loaded from a 'frameset', right? I'm not sure here, so could someone confirm this?
Not real water, we won't see physically simulated water anytime soon, today's processors just can't cope. But yes, HL2 has a good emotional 'engine'. It determines the look on someone's face at any given moment in time, depending on what's happening in the surroundings: firefights, a strange noise, getting trapped, seeing someone get killed, etc etc. Just look at the G-man movie, you can download it at fileplanet and the likes.
Also the physics engine will provide some very good realism, there's good movie clips about that too (again, use fileplanet).
"IMHO, java is really successfull in cross platform software development, without much work i can make java software work on another platform."
Well...DUH! the whole idea behind Java is EXACTLY that: one language, many platforms..NET's motto on the other hand is: many languages, one platform (Windows). Which is fine too.
You sound like you're surprised about the portability of Java, while it's actually one of it's key features!
After reading that little snippet on gamespot, I've got the feeling that the game will be 'letting you win'. It states that if it takes you 20 tries to do something, the game will lower it's standards for you. Why did finishing Splinter Cell make me feel good? Because it makes me feel I've accomplished something. I've mastered the game, no matter how difficult the timing was, no matter how pixel-perfect I had to aim to kill that guy, no matter how hard it was to master. Unless they (Ubisoft) implement this Adaptive AI perfectly and unnoticeable (and I hope they will), I'm going to feel as if no matter how bad I play, or how crummy my timing is, I'm still going to master the game. Adaptive AI could really take the challenge out of any game.
Same here. I've never heard the Wilhelm, probably because screams are harder to recognise or even remember. The Woosh from Doom 2 is often used, next time I hear it i'm going to take note of it. I wonder if it was made especially for doom 2, or if it existed before. Let's google!!
Allright, the interface between GPU and RAM on a GeForce card might be streaming fast, but it isn't on-die like a P4's cache. Increasing the on-die cache on a P4 to a whopping 256MB instead of the standard 256KB or 512KB wouldn't help much speed-wise. The cache is larger, but it will also take more cycles to find something that's stored there, and return it to the register. You can't just go and compare a Graphic card's RAM to a CPU's on-die cache!!
My broadband ISP, called Telenet (Belgium), is excellent. It's flat-rate, standard you have limits of 10GB/month download, 2GB/month upload. Monitored. It's actually not per month, it's counted for the last 30 days. If you've downloaded more than 10GB in the last 30 days, you're put on smallband until you're at 98% of your quota for the last 30 days. If you cross this border more than twice, they put you on smallband for a longer period, and offer you to buy extra datablocks from them. You can also choose to buy these blocks any time you want, up to a limit of 20GBdown-4GBup/last 30 days.
This system works great for me. Say I'm downloading a movie or a game from the newsgroups, and I'm afraid of reaching the limit. I can buy an extra block, extending my limit with an extra GB. After a few days, when it's exactly 31 days ago that I downloaded that batch of pr0n, I can opt out of that extra block. The bill will say something like: 1 extra GB, duration: 3 days, cost: 10 cent. 1GB during 30 days costs 1 euro. That's cheap isn't it? Ah I love this!!
...just got an entirely new meaning for these scientists. It's kind of annoying to see that valuable tax dollars (luckily I'm Europeean, but that doesn't change the fact that I find it a big waste of money) go to scientific research that comes up with 'new' facts that have been generally known for years.
Slashdot Mirror
Mistaking Caydiem for a man is totally excuseable. Check out the 'The Plush Murloc goes to E3' video on this page http://www.craftingworlds.com/videos.html
Somewhere in that vid we can see Caydiem in all her glory. She has a mustache.
I'm currently on page 241 of that book. I read a chapter every night, because I want to advance in poker. I play some friendly brick and mortar games with some buddies every now and then. Put a fiver in at the beginning of the evening, holdem 5 and 10 cent blinds. So fun. Last time I doubled my money :)
:)
I actually didn't know poker was recently becoming more popular, but apparently, it is.
I agree with using that book to start programming: I'm an ICT student and hobbyist programmer myself, and I've played with the idea to just make a poker bot based on what Sklansky writes in this book. I was planning to use Bayes' theorem especially. Add all different factors together (position, early round bets, other player betting history, pot size, possible opponent hands, other player bluffing history, etc etc etc) to decide between call/check/bet/fold. Of course card counting is out of the question: it is completely useless as the deck should be shuffled between every hand, moreover the computer has a big advantage over humans in this area, so it wouldn't at all be hard to make a card counting bot. (remembering your opponent's actions is something good poker players do, count cards they do not)
Too bad I've got exams (one more week to go), else I would have started already
Sweet reference you got there! If I'd had any mod points I would have modded you up :)
"Potential uses for the property: a religious college, spa, golf resort or even a technology park."
Falls under the category of 'religious college' perhaps, but how about a sect HQ? Hare Krishna, Scientology, Wu Manchu, The Stonecutters Lodge, etc. Funding is also not a problem. Most big sects already have enough ties with big industials, criminal syndicats and Hollywood stars to get their hands on enough money to buy the Biosphere.
Or what about evil masterminds? Doctor Papa could finally get a pied-a-terre in the USA!
In fact it's an iron crystal, enlarged 165 (some sources say 150, some say 160, some say 165) billion times. The 9 orbs each represent an iron atom. So it's actually the world's largest ircon crystal, not atom.
Actually it's "Manneke Pis", not mannequin :) Manneke is literally 'little man' or 'small man'. The postfix 'ke' is dialect for 'tje' (so undialected it is 'Mannetje pis'), which is a diminutive, and it doesn't exist in English. Basically you put 'small' or 'little' in front of the translated word to get the same effect, but it doesn't feel the same. 'Manneke pis' means 'little man piss', so you weren't off by much when you think it is 'man that can piss'.
/. appreciate our food and culture :)
Nice to see that people on
I cringe at the sight of that Belgian website about the sundial park in Genk. Awful awful awful. I'm ashamed for my country.
I expect they will make a hell of a techno song using samples from that .wav soundbyte soon :)
Previous work from LMOM includes the famous All Your Base song, and The Terrible Secret of Space. Here is the ICQ prank that started it.
Errr...I don't use Linux (yes, mod me down to whatever u want and don't read on if you must) but why not make a system-wide change: left-click select puts the selection into the clipboard, selecting text with the right mouse button doesn't. Simple. This way the user can choose whether he wants to select-to-copy (left) or select-to-delete (right).
If it's already in the thread, sorry, I only searched the first page and didn't find my suggestion. So why didn't anyone think of this earlier? I don't see any disadvantages...
I agree. Last Christmas I asked for Settlers Of Catan (the basic 3-4 players box) and I've never regretted it. It's quite an expensive game, and some of the pieces (all the roads) were missing right at the start (factory screw-up?) but the very friendly people of 999games sent me the pieces, I had to wait 2 months but it was worth the wait.
Me, my girlfriend, my brother and his girlfriend regularly play a game of Catan and it's always fun. It takes some time before you get a good insight in the game mechanics, but as soon as you develop some tactics it gets more and more fun every time.
What is especially intriguing about the game mechanics is the balance between luck and tactics. You need to understand the bell curve for 2d6, and the factor of luck is almost totally out of the equation.
If you haven't played it yet, try the Java online version of Catan or find a copy of the cheap but crappy CD-ROM version in Dutch (I think the original was German, so you might find that on CDROM too), details here.
Ooh I've had this with many games: ... my computer while I ... wasssss absssent?" Well, not as distinct of course. Just stretching my s a bit longer than normal, and pausing my sentence sometimes.
-Back in the day when I played a lot of Counter-Strike, I regularly *thought* I heard someone saying "Bomb has been planted".
-In the period I played through Half-Life I sometimes heard the hound-eye barking sound while sitting at home watching tv.
-I've watched the Half-Life 2 preview movies so often that I started to take on G-man type speech. Not on purpose. I would go like: "Hasssss anyone touched
If I had any modpoints I'd mod you up, but I don't so I'll reward you for your insight with a reply. I hate it when people say they hate Microsoft. As you say, it's ok to hate the company but whining about it won't help. A few days ago, when the sasser worm news was on /. people were complaining that warezed versions of Windows XP are to blame, because they're the most likely to not have any security patches installed, and thus help spread the worm. Now Microsoft fixes this (4 days after it's been brought up on slashdot as an 'idea'!!), and people start cracking jokes and saying that it's useless etc etc. I just can't bend my head around this...(yeah I must be new here :p )
In theory, they could get way more than 15kb/sec. There's always numerous sattellites within range, so connectivity and bandwidth shouldn't be a problem. Problem is, I don't think they can use commercial satellites, because their communications are supposed to be secret. NASA doesn't want people eavesdropping :)
My thought exactly. Compare:
Tricoders
TricoRders
Last one gives more relevant results.
I always wondered why Half-Life had these 'bot' skins, as seen here. I've been playing HL since 1998 and I've never understood why these skins are in, they're not even skins of characters in the single-player game, and all the other skins are. Then I read somewhere that those skins were made for the German version of the game, where the human Grunts (army soldiers, there to shut you up for good, yadda yadda) are replaced by robots gone totally friggin mad 0MGz0r! Talk about killing the story-line of the game... I also believe that scientists couldn't be killed by the player. You can always let them stand under an automatic door and let them get squished when it closes. ent_scientist1 was killed by func_door (or something) :)
What you could do is just make 1:1 images of your cd-roms and store them on your HD, then use Alcohol 120% or some other software to mount the image on a virtual cd-rom drive instead of putting the cd-rom in your physical cd-rom drive. It would consume alot of space on your HD, but perhaps it's not a bad idea, considering that it's always good to have back-ups of your precious expensive store-bought software ;) Most if not all cd-rom checks can be cracked, and most if not all copy-protections can be circumvented using the right tools. Blind-read and blind-write are good, and so is Alcohol 120% or CloneCD.
It sounds logical but perhaps it isn't: if you open a web-page with two frames, one for http://slashdot.org and one for http://www.google.com, then both webservers see your IP as the requester right? So far I believe I'm right. But if http://slashdot.org has two frames, one with src=http://www.google.com and the other with src=index.html then google sees the referer for that hit as http://slashdot.org, because the page was loaded from a 'frameset', right? I'm not sure here, so could someone confirm this?
Not real water, we won't see physically simulated water anytime soon, today's processors just can't cope. But yes, HL2 has a good emotional 'engine'. It determines the look on someone's face at any given moment in time, depending on what's happening in the surroundings: firefights, a strange noise, getting trapped, seeing someone get killed, etc etc. Just look at the G-man movie, you can download it at fileplanet and the likes. Also the physics engine will provide some very good realism, there's good movie clips about that too (again, use fileplanet).
"IMHO, java is really successfull in cross platform software development, without much work i can make java software work on another platform."
.NET's motto on the other hand is: many languages, one platform (Windows). Which is fine too.
Well...DUH! the whole idea behind Java is EXACTLY that: one language, many platforms.
You sound like you're surprised about the portability of Java, while it's actually one of it's key features!
After reading that little snippet on gamespot, I've got the feeling that the game will be 'letting you win'. It states that if it takes you 20 tries to do something, the game will lower it's standards for you. Why did finishing Splinter Cell make me feel good? Because it makes me feel I've accomplished something. I've mastered the game, no matter how difficult the timing was, no matter how pixel-perfect I had to aim to kill that guy, no matter how hard it was to master. Unless they (Ubisoft) implement this Adaptive AI perfectly and unnoticeable (and I hope they will), I'm going to feel as if no matter how bad I play, or how crummy my timing is, I'm still going to master the game. Adaptive AI could really take the challenge out of any game.
Same here. I've never heard the Wilhelm, probably because screams are harder to recognise or even remember. The Woosh from Doom 2 is often used, next time I hear it i'm going to take note of it. I wonder if it was made especially for doom 2, or if it existed before. Let's google!!
Allright, the interface between GPU and RAM on a GeForce card might be streaming fast, but it isn't on-die like a P4's cache. Increasing the on-die cache on a P4 to a whopping 256MB instead of the standard 256KB or 512KB wouldn't help much speed-wise. The cache is larger, but it will also take more cycles to find something that's stored there, and return it to the register. You can't just go and compare a Graphic card's RAM to a CPU's on-die cache!!
My broadband ISP, called Telenet (Belgium), is excellent. It's flat-rate, standard you have limits of 10GB/month download, 2GB/month upload. Monitored. It's actually not per month, it's counted for the last 30 days. If you've downloaded more than 10GB in the last 30 days, you're put on smallband until you're at 98% of your quota for the last 30 days. If you cross this border more than twice, they put you on smallband for a longer period, and offer you to buy extra datablocks from them. You can also choose to buy these blocks any time you want, up to a limit of 20GBdown-4GBup/last 30 days.
This system works great for me. Say I'm downloading a movie or a game from the newsgroups, and I'm afraid of reaching the limit. I can buy an extra block, extending my limit with an extra GB. After a few days, when it's exactly 31 days ago that I downloaded that batch of pr0n, I can opt out of that extra block. The bill will say something like: 1 extra GB, duration: 3 days, cost: 10 cent. 1GB during 30 days costs 1 euro. That's cheap isn't it? Ah I love this!!
immunesystem > /dev/null
...just got an entirely new meaning for these scientists. It's kind of annoying to see that valuable tax dollars (luckily I'm Europeean, but that doesn't change the fact that I find it a big waste of money) go to scientific research that comes up with 'new' facts that have been generally known for years.