Go and chess are both computations: In both games there are no unknowns but the strategy of the other player. You may not know that the other guy is going to castle, but you know that he CAN castle. Therefor, you can theoretically work out the optimal series of moves from any given state.
Games like backgammon and poker have unknowns - you may know what is in your hand, but you don't know what is next up, nor do you know what the other player has. As a result, given the state you can see, you CANNOT compute a single optimal set of moves - all you can do is probablistically state "most of the time, this would be the best move".
Add to that bluffing - in poker you can bluff the other guy into losing when he should have won.
Now, consider card games like Magic: The Gathering . Not only do you not know what the other guy's next draw is, nor what he has in his hand, you cannot even for certain limit the set of what he can draw very much - "Does he have a Force Of Nature? He might, or he might not."
In addtion, since each card can change the behavior of the other cards, the combinatorial growth of the game state is extremely large. You might be winning, then the other guy plays a card that completely changes how your cards act.
Given the above, much of the game is decided before you even sit at the table - how you construct your deck may decide the game, even before you see your opponent. AND you might change your deck, based on what you observe of the opponent's strategy.
Given the above, what I would like to see would be a computer program that could, given a set of N cards, compose a deck of M card (where M < N), play that deck against an opponent, then compose a new deck from the same N cards that answers the strategy of the opposing player.
When we can do that, THEN I'll believe we have real A.I.
I use Matlab under Linux professionally (designing DSP filters).
The reason you don't see it much is that it is more expensive than the Windows version. Also, the Unix version require a license server to be running on the network.
That's why the transport layer should incorporate forward error correction.
I don't know about what TAPR is doing, but I do know that in APCO-25, there's about as much FEC as there is voice data - just about 1 bit of error correction for every bit of voice data.
And with all the block convolution and CRC and so on, you pretty much have to chuck a bus through the signal before it starts to cough.
I love the fact that a good, Free Software voice codec is out there, and here are my reasons:
1) Ham Radio. The Tucson Amateur Packet Radio organization is working on experimental digitized voice over amateur radio applications, and a couple of venders (mostly Kenwood) are offering radios that have this ability. Right now, TAPR are looking at using DVSI's IMBE vocoder, which is QUITE expensive and VERY not-Free. The availability of a Free codec would greatly improve the availabilty of this protocol. 2) Currently, The Association of Public-Safety Officials (APCO) (the folks who define the specs for the radios used by police, fire, and government) have defined the current digital trunked radio standard, APCO Project 25 as using DVSI's IMBE vocoder. While this is licensed under a Reasonable And Non-Discrimitory license, if you want to license the IMBE vocoder for a P-25 project, you will cough up US$100,000.00 for the privilege (I know firsthand, as the company I work for has done this). Uniden, Radio Shack, and other scanner companies are looking into putting this into their scanners, so they have had to cough it up as well. A Free vocoder would allow anybody to build a product with this capability in it - you could even use a scanner and your sound card to decode the Phase 1 C4FM format signals.
Like so many other things, a Free Software tool to do these things would greatly accelerate the industry. I hope Xiph does well.
I've received dozens of the "U 2 KIN MAKE $$$$ ON EBAY" spams.
I've forwarded them on to eBay, saying "I know you didn't send this, but it is trading on your trademarked name, and damaging your credibility. You REALLY should serve this guy with a cease-and-desist order".
Every time, eBay has sent me the auto-ack message, and most of the time, a follow up saying <voice type="Goofy">"Duhhh-up Dis didn't come from us, No Sir, it didn't. Cain't do a thing about it, nope."</voice>
eBay likes spam like that, because it encourages people to buy and sell stuff on eBay, making eBay money. As long as they have plausible deniability, and will therefor suffer no ill effects from the fraud themselves, they will tacitly allow it to continue.
You were able to manage your career and make an expectations of what you'll be earning and you were able to manage your credit.
BZZT! WRONG.
I was laid off from my first job after eight months. I was unemployed for some time thereafter. Don't give me this "it was harder for us" crap - it won't wash.
I simply didn't spend money I didn't have. My first car was an old beater. My stereo was the same boombox I was given as a present when I entered college. I didn't buy things I couldn't write a check for. It was YEARS before I got my first credit card.
I simply lived within my means - something YOU obviously cannot understand.
"Buried in ... credit card debt"
on
Generation Wrecked
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
throw BOO_HOO("Your own damn fault");
I take exception to this statement - if you are up to your ass in credit card debt, you have no-one but yourself to blame.
I was reading how the AVERAGE college student has over $5000 in credit card debt (and here am I obsessing over having a debt of about that when I have a high-paying job!) When I went to school, I didn't even HAVE a credit card! Why?
BECAUSE I DIDN'T HAVE A FREAKING JOB!
No income -> no way to pay -> no card!
It's one thing to have a high student loan burden - but that's why you have TEN YEARS to pay it off!
If people would stop going into debt for crap that will have no value when the debt is paid off, and ONLY go into debt for things of long-term value (i.e. don't go into debt buying a stereo, go into debt buying a HOUSE! Don't buy expensive cars that will be junk before you clear the debt, buy a car you can pay off in a couple of years or less) then they would be a lot less worried about the future.
But because credit cards are easy to get, and kids in school are told "Go ahead, buy that stereo, buy that DVD player, go to Padre for Spring Break, you have a credit card", they end up with a lot of crap and a lot of debt!
I was born in 1965, so I miss being a Gen-X'er by a year. I was fortunate to be born to parents that were children of the Depression, and who hadn't bought into the BS put out by Dr.'s Spock et. al. I was raised to take responsibility for my life.
So BOO HOO HOO, cry me a river for the kids who screwed up by charging a bunch of crap on their credit cards. Maybe they will learn from their mistakes.
So, you criticise my calculations, saying that I am off by a couple of orders of magnitude. You cannot back up your assertions about beamsize, saying only "Trust me". You don't talk about the bandwidth of the system, which I am also probably off by a couple of orders of magnitude, so that would tend to cancel out your assertion. You also don't address my point about the uplink.
If you can point me to where the design parameters of the system are, I will gladly educate myself. However, I have all too often seen people saying "I cannot show you the design, but this will work. Honest!" Forgive me if I choose not to trust such individuals.
I'm running Irix 6.5.16 at home on my Indy, and I also installed the build of Gnome that SGI has made for Irix (because I HATE 4dwm!)
I just wish that SGI would make an up2date/Red Carpet like system for Irix, especially for the Gnome stuff - in the build I have, things like the pager applet don't work (which is a BIG pain - no virtual desktops!).
Also, supposedly Irix now supports IMP/S2 style mice (i.e. with a wheel) - but I have not been able to get it working on my system.
I'd put Linux on my Indy in a heartbeat IF the support for all the A/V systems was there....
You can create spots on the DOWNLINK side - after all, that's what the TV birds do. However, the spot size is still very large, so my arguement still stands.
However, you CANNOT do the same on the uplink without putting a dish on the person's house|hut|car|camel|...
So you are STILL limited on the upstream bandwidth.
Satellite broadband for the masses won't work. Period.
Here's the math to back that up.
Assume a bird at LEO - about 100 miles up, serving about a 500 mile footprint.
Assume said bird is running a 1 GHz wide communications channel (not a 1 GHz center frequency, 1 GHz bandwidth. That puts the center freq around 10 GHz at least, where there are very large space losses - just getting your signal down costs you a lot of signal).
Assume the protocol used by the bird gets about 4 bits per second per Hz (That's a pretty high value - the signal to noise ratio will have to be VERY low for this to work.)
Assume an overhead of 2 bits per byte transmitted. This includes all protocol below TCP/IP, error correction, collisions, retransmits, etc.
OK, given those numbers, you get about 400 Mbytes/sec downlink throughput.
Assume you want to supply everyone with DSL equivelent speeds - 40 kByte/sec.
400 Mbyte/sec divided by 40 kByte/sec = 100 thousand users per bird.
100 thousand users per 500 * pi miles = 64 users/square mile. Anyplace the user density is higher than that would swamp the system.
And remember, I've been using very LARGE (i.e. very favorable to satellite downlink) numbers.
Satellite is GREAT for wide-open, low population density areas. The problem then becomes you cannot get enough people to pay for the birds.
In high density areas, land based wireless and wireline are MUCH more cost effective. In less populated areas, ideas like the solar aircraft are more feasible than satellites. In REALLY unpopulated areas, there just ISN'T a technology that can do the job without some sort of subsidy.
It is understandable why you might want to avoid the appearance of blowing your own horn, but perhaps a Slashdot meta-section might keep the myriad complaints about (moderation|metamoderation|karma|layout|...) from cluttering the other sections.
Yes, I know Brand X has this, but perhaps/. should as well.
I'd advise against getting an All-In-Wonder card if you run Linux, since the GATOS team (the folks doing 2D video capture, tuner support, and TV out) and the DRI team (the folks doing OpenGL 3D support) have yet to sync their code so that the two play nicely together. Thus, you can have EITHER video capture and tuner support, XOR accelerated 3D support. You cannot have both.
I could understand if this condition persisted for a few weeks - the teams are different groups with different goals. However, this has been the case for several MONTHS, and I see no motion towards resolving this.
This is one of the places that the bazaar approach is weaker than the cathedral approach - independant teams don't co-ordinate very well in such matters.
So, at this time if you want both tuner support AND accelerated 3D, I would suggest getting a seperate TV tuner card.
(And I am viewing this very post on a AIW7500. I have a classic AIW in my server in the basement, and in the past I've had a Voodoo 3500TV. I have some experience in this matter.)
(And I don't have time to fix this - I have to work on modifying the USB joystick drivers to report the hat as buttons so that I can use it under UT/US2003, getting ATA/133 & LBA48 working, getting video streaming working from my DTIVO, trying to find out why Wine has show regressions in the past week....)
Actually, I read the article more thoroughly than you read my post. I was responding to the item that the Slashdot editors and the story submitter had seized upon - the control of the robotic arms, which were completely open loop.
Indeed, the rat experiment was a closed loop - the rat thought, and could see the results of the thought, i.e. the dispenser fired.
That is my whole point - IF you close the loop, THEN the brain can learn. The closing of the loop can be by haptic feedback, by visual feedback, by auditory feedback, but in any case the results of the action MUST be communicated back to the brain initiating the action. The monkey wasn't getting feedback from the arms, so the loop wasn't closed.
I wish the article had presented a bit more background on these guys predictions than "Here's the worst, here's the best, here's the current". That really doesn't let me gauge whether these guys are making good predictions or not.
Consider Slashdot posts: You might say that my highest rated post is 5, my lowest -1, and my most recent is 3. But, does that give you any real feel for whether you want to read my posts? Now, if you said that my mean post value was 3.5, my mode was 4, and that only 10% of my posts are rated less than 2 (NOTE: all figures are made up - I don't keep that close track on my moderations) then you might be able to judge better.
Simillarly, when judging someone's ability to predict where things are going, I'd like to know what their ratio of hits to misses are. If somebody is right no more often than they are wrong, then I can weight their prediction accordingly.
That's one of the problems I had with Tomorrowland at Disney - it's nothing but a bunch of predictions from the past. I'd rather they have done a "Yesterday's Tomorrow" - for every decade show what people thought the future was going to look like, along with a reality check. Show the things they got wrong (flying cars), the things they got right (television), and the things they completely missed (computers).
OT: is anybody else having problems getting to/.? For the past week I've had a timeout on about 1 in three connections to/., both from work and from home.
At the current time, all they are doing with the robot arms is ape-ing (pun intended) the motion of the monkey's arm - the monkey is NOT using the robot arms to accomplish tasks. Rather, as the monkey uses it own arm to accomplish tasks, the robot arms are making the same motions. The monkey is no more "controlling" two arms in addition to her own than I would be controlling two computers just because I had VNC displaying the same thing on both computers.
In other experiments the researchers HAVE closed the loop, by using the brain activity to control a cursor on a screen the monkey can see. Thus, the control loop is closed: Screen feeds brain feeds computer feeds screen.
But until they can close the loop controlling the arm, by providing some form of tactile feedback, the system isn't very useful. That is their next step - closing the loop by stimulating the monkey's skin in proportion to the force the arm is experiencing.
Now, if they can combine this research with the work being done on rats to stimulate the sensation nerves, then they may have something that can help paraplegics. And given how plastic the brain is - how good the brain is at adapting to its feedback, then there is a good chance we might be able to make useful direct brain controlled limbs.
I think about the ideas Douglas C. Engelbar did, vs. the Microsoft "vision of the future".
Consider: Douglas Engelbart didn't just come up with wizzier ways to do the same old crap ("Look, this thing AUTOMATICALLY puts the memo in the pneumatic tube FOR YOU!"), he looked at technologies that didn't exist yet and asked "And how could this be used to be more productive".
Ever since seeing that video I have been asking "And where is that sort of demo TODAY?" "What would a demo that is as far in advance of today's state of the art look like?"
It would take ENORMOUS resources to pull off such a demo. It would take an organization that has plenty of R&D money to be able to do that kind of research.
Microsoft could do it - they have the people, they have the money. What they don't have is the vision.
My apologies to the various Microsoft employees that read Slashdot, but I assert that MS does not have the vision to create a demo on the scale of the Englebart demo. Englebart's vision was "How can we improve our ability to work on complicated projects", Microsoft's vision is "How do we gain even more monopolies and make even more money". MS employees, this is not a slam against you - it is an indictment of the very top level of management at Microsoft.
And mind you, Microsoft is not alone in this - most companies today are as myopic as a mole in this. They have no motivation to really improve the world, they improve the world only as a side effect of trying to "maximize shareholder value". But the companies that REALLY take off are not the ones trying to artificially inflate their stock price, but rather those companies who's products truly revolutionize the world.
One of the metrics used to decide trademark cases it "the possibility of confusion" - the likelyhood that the alleged infringer may be mistaken for the infringed by the customers of the infringed.
Remember the target market of the "? for Dummies" books - people so stupid that they are willing to buy books calling them Dummies.
No, there is no problem of false key registration - the idea is just to have the ability to trace the message back to someone. The ISP that the key is registered with has the responsibility of confirming the identity of the user - basically, where does the money to pay for the mail account come from.
If I can trace the money, I have the sender.
True, this means that Hotmail et. al. are implicitly untrusted, but then what else is new?
Actually, the Stone didn't really WANT to license "Start Me Up" to Microsoft. When MS approached the Stones about it, the Stones set what they thought was a ridiculously high price, figuring MS would balk.
When MS (metaphoricly) reached into its back pocket, withdrew its billfold, and started counting out bills, the Stones realised they had forgotten who they were dealing with.
... release a good game with Linux support, and I'll buy it.
And how will the marketroids know that you bought the game because it had Linux support? ESP?
Or are you asking them to sell the Linux version of the game seperately from the Windows version? As I pointed out in my previous post, that won't work. Even if the games are released at the same time, a store only has so much stock they can afford to have. Given the choice of stocking a Linux version that will sell 2 copies, or stocking 2 more copies of the Windows version that are guaranteed to move, what do you think the shopkeep will do?
And if the game has the Linux version in the same box as the Windows version, then the marketroids will have no idea you aren't another Windows user.
Thank you for being a strawman I could knock down. It really helps me make my point.
Remember, if you buy UT2003, and you are going to run it under Linux:
SEND IN THOSE REGISTRATION CARDS!
Make sure that when the vendor tallies the results that Linux is well-represented.
Allow me to compare and contrast UT2003 with QuakeIII in this regard:
QIII: Windows shipped first. Linux shipped later. Justification: "We need to be able to track the Linux shipments." Result: hard-core games bought Windows version, waited to download Linux version.
UT2003: Both versions are in the box. Result: Hard-core gamers can get whatever version they choose to run now.
The problem with email is there is no way to verify that what you are reading really came from BillyBob@foo.com - it could have been forged at any step of the way.
What we need is the idea of a "trusted server":
1) A trusted server only accepts mail from sources it can trust: 1a) Users - users are trusted because their mail is sent via SSL, and signed with a private key the user has (with the mail server having the public key). 1b) Other mail servers: they are trusted because they sign all mail they send with their private key. The public key is available via something like a DNS TXT record for that IP. 2) The message is signed by each mail server it moves through. Thus, at any step, you can verify the mail by checking each level by getting the public key for the sender and computing an MD5 hash. If it doesn't check, then you know: 2a) The message was bogus at that point, 2b) The mail server that accepted it didn't verify the message, so 2c) That mail server can no longer be trusted.
Now, all that does is make sure that that ad for "Viagra for Goats!" originated with Ralsky@spammers.net - of itself it does not solve the problem. However, I can tell my mail server that anything coming through spammers.net is to be rejected out of hand. Also, if some chickboner sends me a spam, I know exactly where it came from and can raise hell with his ISP (and if they don't solve the problem to my satisfaction, they get blocked too.)
This is the problem with blocklists now - you can blocklist the mainsleaze spammers, but the chickboners and the relay rapers will still crapflood you worse than reading at -1.
(note: support for old clients can be supplied either by a proxy program on the client's PC, or by using a RADIUS lookup to verify that the person the mail is purportedly from matches the person authenticated on that IP.)
Slashdot Mirror
Go and chess are both computations: In both games there are no unknowns but the strategy of the other player. You may not know that the other guy is going to castle, but you know that he CAN castle. Therefor, you can theoretically work out the optimal series of moves from any given state.
Games like backgammon and poker have unknowns - you may know what is in your hand, but you don't know what is next up, nor do you know what the other player has. As a result, given the state you can see, you CANNOT compute a single optimal set of moves - all you can do is probablistically state "most of the time, this would be the best move".
Add to that bluffing - in poker you can bluff the other guy into losing when he should have won.
Now, consider card games like Magic: The Gathering . Not only do you not know what the other guy's next draw is, nor what he has in his hand, you cannot even for certain limit the set of what he can draw very much - "Does he have a Force Of Nature? He might, or he might not."
In addtion, since each card can change the behavior of the other cards, the combinatorial growth of the game state is extremely large. You might be winning, then the other guy plays a card that completely changes how your cards act.
Given the above, much of the game is decided before you even sit at the table - how you construct your deck may decide the game, even before you see your opponent. AND you might change your deck, based on what you observe of the opponent's strategy.
Given the above, what I would like to see would be a computer program that could, given a set of N cards, compose a deck of M card (where M < N), play that deck against an opponent, then compose a new deck from the same N cards that answers the strategy of the opposing player.
When we can do that, THEN I'll believe we have real A.I.
I use Matlab under Linux professionally (designing DSP filters).
The reason you don't see it much is that it is more expensive than the Windows version. Also, the Unix version require a license server to be running on the network.
That's why the transport layer should incorporate forward error correction.
I don't know about what TAPR is doing, but I do know that in APCO-25, there's about as much FEC as there is voice data - just about 1 bit of error correction for every bit of voice data.
And with all the block convolution and CRC and so on, you pretty much have to chuck a bus through the signal before it starts to cough.
I love the fact that a good, Free Software voice codec is out there, and here are my reasons:
1) Ham Radio. The Tucson Amateur Packet Radio organization is working on experimental digitized voice over amateur radio applications, and a couple of venders (mostly Kenwood) are offering radios that have this ability. Right now, TAPR are looking at using DVSI's IMBE vocoder, which is QUITE expensive and VERY not-Free. The availability of a Free codec would greatly improve the availabilty of this protocol.
2) Currently, The Association of Public-Safety Officials (APCO) (the folks who define the specs for the radios used by police, fire, and government) have defined the current digital trunked radio standard, APCO Project 25 as using DVSI's IMBE vocoder. While this is licensed under a Reasonable And Non-Discrimitory license, if you want to license the IMBE vocoder for a P-25 project, you will cough up US$100,000.00 for the privilege (I know firsthand, as the company I work for has done this). Uniden, Radio Shack, and other scanner companies are looking into putting this into their scanners, so they have had to cough it up as well. A Free vocoder would allow anybody to build a product with this capability in it - you could even use a scanner and your sound card to decode the Phase 1 C4FM format signals.
Like so many other things, a Free Software tool to do these things would greatly accelerate the industry. I hope Xiph does well.
I've received dozens of the "U 2 KIN MAKE $$$$ ON EBAY" spams.
I've forwarded them on to eBay, saying "I know you didn't send this, but it is trading on your trademarked name, and damaging your credibility. You REALLY should serve this guy with a cease-and-desist order".
Every time, eBay has sent me the auto-ack message, and most of the time, a follow up saying <voice type="Goofy">"Duhhh-up Dis didn't come from us, No Sir, it didn't. Cain't do a thing about it, nope."</voice>
eBay likes spam like that, because it encourages people to buy and sell stuff on eBay, making eBay money. As long as they have plausible deniability, and will therefor suffer no ill effects from the fraud themselves, they will tacitly allow it to continue.
BZZT! WRONG.
I was laid off from my first job after eight months. I was unemployed for some time thereafter. Don't give me this "it was harder for us" crap - it won't wash.
I simply didn't spend money I didn't have. My first car was an old beater. My stereo was the same boombox I was given as a present when I entered college. I didn't buy things I couldn't write a check for. It was YEARS before I got my first credit card.
I simply lived within my means - something YOU obviously cannot understand.
throw BOO_HOO("Your own damn fault");
I take exception to this statement - if you are up to your ass in credit card debt, you have no-one but yourself to blame.
I was reading how the AVERAGE college student has over $5000 in credit card debt (and here am I obsessing over having a debt of about that when I have a high-paying job!) When I went to school, I didn't even HAVE a credit card! Why?
BECAUSE I DIDN'T HAVE A FREAKING JOB!
No income -> no way to pay -> no card!
It's one thing to have a high student loan burden - but that's why you have TEN YEARS to pay it off!
If people would stop going into debt for crap that will have no value when the debt is paid off, and ONLY go into debt for things of long-term value (i.e. don't go into debt buying a stereo, go into debt buying a HOUSE! Don't buy expensive cars that will be junk before you clear the debt, buy a car you can pay off in a couple of years or less) then they would be a lot less worried about the future.
But because credit cards are easy to get, and kids in school are told "Go ahead, buy that stereo, buy that DVD player, go to Padre for Spring Break, you have a credit card", they end up with a lot of crap and a lot of debt!
I was born in 1965, so I miss being a Gen-X'er by a year. I was fortunate to be born to parents that were children of the Depression, and who hadn't bought into the BS put out by Dr.'s Spock et. al. I was raised to take responsibility for my life.
So BOO HOO HOO, cry me a river for the kids who screwed up by charging a bunch of crap on their credit cards. Maybe they will learn from their mistakes.
But I doubt it.
So, you criticise my calculations, saying that I am off by a couple of orders of magnitude. You cannot back up your assertions about beamsize, saying only "Trust me". You don't talk about the bandwidth of the system, which I am also probably off by a couple of orders of magnitude, so that would tend to cancel out your assertion. You also don't address my point about the uplink.
If you can point me to where the design parameters of the system are, I will gladly educate myself. However, I have all too often seen people saying "I cannot show you the design, but this will work. Honest!" Forgive me if I choose not to trust such individuals.
I'm running Irix 6.5.16 at home on my Indy, and I also installed the build of Gnome that SGI has made for Irix (because I HATE 4dwm!)
I just wish that SGI would make an up2date/Red Carpet like system for Irix, especially for the Gnome stuff - in the build I have, things like the pager applet don't work (which is a BIG pain - no virtual desktops!).
Also, supposedly Irix now supports IMP/S2 style mice (i.e. with a wheel) - but I have not been able to get it working on my system.
I'd put Linux on my Indy in a heartbeat IF the support for all the A/V systems was there....
You can create spots on the DOWNLINK side - after all, that's what the TV birds do. However, the spot size is still very large, so my arguement still stands.
However, you CANNOT do the same on the uplink without putting a dish on the person's house|hut|car|camel|...
So you are STILL limited on the upstream bandwidth.
Not quite - in a cable modem system, you can increase bandwidth by subdividing the area with additional cable runs.
You cannot subdivide a satellite system except by reducing the footprint of the bird - which you can do ONLY by lowering the orbit.
And there is only so low you can go before you are no longer an orbital bird but an atmospheric one.
Satellite broadband for the masses won't work. Period.
Here's the math to back that up.
Assume a bird at LEO - about 100 miles up, serving about a 500 mile footprint.
Assume said bird is running a 1 GHz wide communications channel (not a 1 GHz center frequency, 1 GHz bandwidth. That puts the center freq around 10 GHz at least, where there are very large space losses - just getting your signal down costs you a lot of signal).
Assume the protocol used by the bird gets about 4 bits per second per Hz (That's a pretty high value - the signal to noise ratio will have to be VERY low for this to work.)
Assume an overhead of 2 bits per byte transmitted. This includes all protocol below TCP/IP, error correction, collisions, retransmits, etc.
OK, given those numbers, you get about 400 Mbytes/sec downlink throughput.
Assume you want to supply everyone with DSL equivelent speeds - 40 kByte/sec.
400 Mbyte/sec divided by 40 kByte/sec = 100 thousand users per bird.
100 thousand users per 500 * pi miles = 64 users/square mile. Anyplace the user density is higher than that would swamp the system.
And remember, I've been using very LARGE (i.e. very favorable to satellite downlink) numbers.
Satellite is GREAT for wide-open, low population density areas. The problem then becomes you cannot get enough people to pay for the birds.
In high density areas, land based wireless and wireline are MUCH more cost effective. In less populated areas, ideas like the solar aircraft are more feasible than satellites. In REALLY unpopulated areas, there just ISN'T a technology that can do the job without some sort of subsidy.
It is understandable why you might want to avoid the appearance of blowing your own horn, but perhaps a Slashdot meta-section might keep the myriad complaints about (moderation|metamoderation|karma|layout|...) from cluttering the other sections.
/. should as well.
Yes, I know Brand X has this, but perhaps
I'd advise against getting an All-In-Wonder card if you run Linux, since the GATOS team (the folks doing 2D video capture, tuner support, and TV out) and the DRI team (the folks doing OpenGL 3D support) have yet to sync their code so that the two play nicely together. Thus, you can have EITHER video capture and tuner support, XOR accelerated 3D support. You cannot have both.
I could understand if this condition persisted for a few weeks - the teams are different groups with different goals. However, this has been the case for several MONTHS, and I see no motion towards resolving this.
This is one of the places that the bazaar approach is weaker than the cathedral approach - independant teams don't co-ordinate very well in such matters.
So, at this time if you want both tuner support AND accelerated 3D, I would suggest getting a seperate TV tuner card.
(And I am viewing this very post on a AIW7500. I have a classic AIW in my server in the basement, and in the past I've had a Voodoo 3500TV. I have some experience in this matter.)
(And I don't have time to fix this - I have to work on modifying the USB joystick drivers to report the hat as buttons so that I can use it under UT/US2003, getting ATA/133 & LBA48 working, getting video streaming working from my DTIVO, trying to find out why Wine has show regressions in the past week....)
Actually, I read the article more thoroughly than you read my post. I was responding to the item that the Slashdot editors and the story submitter had seized upon - the control of the robotic arms, which were completely open loop.
Indeed, the rat experiment was a closed loop - the rat thought, and could see the results of the thought, i.e. the dispenser fired.
That is my whole point - IF you close the loop, THEN the brain can learn. The closing of the loop can be by haptic feedback, by visual feedback, by auditory feedback, but in any case the results of the action MUST be communicated back to the brain initiating the action. The monkey wasn't getting feedback from the arms, so the loop wasn't closed.
I wish the article had presented a bit more background on these guys predictions than "Here's the worst, here's the best, here's the current". That really doesn't let me gauge whether these guys are making good predictions or not.
/.? For the past week I've had a timeout on about 1 in three connections to /., both from work and from home.
Consider Slashdot posts: You might say that my highest rated post is 5, my lowest -1, and my most recent is 3. But, does that give you any real feel for whether you want to read my posts? Now, if you said that my mean post value was 3.5, my mode was 4, and that only 10% of my posts are rated less than 2 (NOTE: all figures are made up - I don't keep that close track on my moderations) then you might be able to judge better.
Simillarly, when judging someone's ability to predict where things are going, I'd like to know what their ratio of hits to misses are. If somebody is right no more often than they are wrong, then I can weight their prediction accordingly.
That's one of the problems I had with Tomorrowland at Disney - it's nothing but a bunch of predictions from the past. I'd rather they have done a "Yesterday's Tomorrow" - for every decade show what people thought the future was going to look like, along with a reality check. Show the things they got wrong (flying cars), the things they got right (television), and the things they completely missed (computers).
OT: is anybody else having problems getting to
At the current time, all they are doing with the robot arms is ape-ing (pun intended) the motion of the monkey's arm - the monkey is NOT using the robot arms to accomplish tasks. Rather, as the monkey uses it own arm to accomplish tasks, the robot arms are making the same motions. The monkey is no more "controlling" two arms in addition to her own than I would be controlling two computers just because I had VNC displaying the same thing on both computers.
In other experiments the researchers HAVE closed the loop, by using the brain activity to control a cursor on a screen the monkey can see. Thus, the control loop is closed: Screen feeds brain feeds computer feeds screen.
But until they can close the loop controlling the arm, by providing some form of tactile feedback, the system isn't very useful. That is their next step - closing the loop by stimulating the monkey's skin in proportion to the force the arm is experiencing.
Now, if they can combine this research with the work being done on rats to stimulate the sensation nerves, then they may have something that can help paraplegics. And given how plastic the brain is - how good the brain is at adapting to its feedback, then there is a good chance we might be able to make useful direct brain controlled limbs.
I think about the ideas Douglas C. Engelbar did, vs. the Microsoft "vision of the future".
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Consider: Douglas Engelbart didn't just come up with wizzier ways to do the same old crap ("Look, this thing AUTOMATICALLY puts the memo in the pneumatic tube FOR YOU!"), he looked at technologies that didn't exist yet and asked "And how could this be used to be more productive".
Ever since seeing that video I have been asking "And where is that sort of demo TODAY?" "What would a demo that is as far in advance of today's state of the art look like?"
It would take ENORMOUS resources to pull off such a demo. It would take an organization that has plenty of R&D money to be able to do that kind of research.
Microsoft could do it - they have the people, they have the money. What they don't have is the vision
My apologies to the various Microsoft employees that read Slashdot, but I assert that MS does not have the vision to create a demo on the scale of the Englebart demo. Englebart's vision was "How can we improve our ability to work on complicated projects", Microsoft's vision is "How do we gain even more monopolies and make even more money". MS employees, this is not a slam against you - it is an indictment of the very top level of management at Microsoft.
And mind you, Microsoft is not alone in this - most companies today are as myopic as a mole in this. They have no motivation to really improve the world, they improve the world only as a side effect of trying to "maximize shareholder value". But the companies that REALLY take off are not the ones trying to artificially inflate their stock price, but rather those companies who's products truly revolutionize the world.
One of the metrics used to decide trademark cases it "the possibility of confusion" - the likelyhood that the alleged infringer may be mistaken for the infringed by the customers of the infringed.
Remember the target market of the "? for Dummies" books - people so stupid that they are willing to buy books calling them Dummies.
Perhaps there are grounds for this case...
<subtitle target="clueless">sarcasm</subtitle>
No, there is no problem of false key registration - the idea is just to have the ability to trace the message back to someone. The ISP that the key is registered with has the responsibility of confirming the identity of the user - basically, where does the money to pay for the mail account come from.
If I can trace the money, I have the sender.
True, this means that Hotmail et. al. are implicitly untrusted, but then what else is new?
Actually, the Stone didn't really WANT to license "Start Me Up" to Microsoft. When MS approached the Stones about it, the Stones set what they thought was a ridiculously high price, figuring MS would balk.
When MS (metaphoricly) reached into its back pocket, withdrew its billfold, and started counting out bills, the Stones realised they had forgotten who they were dealing with.
And how will the marketroids know that you bought the game because it had Linux support? ESP?
Or are you asking them to sell the Linux version of the game seperately from the Windows version? As I pointed out in my previous post, that won't work. Even if the games are released at the same time, a store only has so much stock they can afford to have. Given the choice of stocking a Linux version that will sell 2 copies, or stocking 2 more copies of the Windows version that are guaranteed to move, what do you think the shopkeep will do?
And if the game has the Linux version in the same box as the Windows version, then the marketroids will have no idea you aren't another Windows user.
Thank you for being a strawman I could knock down. It really helps me make my point.
SEND IN THOSE REGISTRATION CARDS!
Make sure that when the vendor tallies the results that Linux is well-represented.
Allow me to compare and contrast UT2003 with QuakeIII in this regard:
QIII: Windows shipped first. Linux shipped later. Justification: "We need to be able to track the Linux shipments."
Result: hard-core games bought Windows version, waited to download Linux version.
UT2003: Both versions are in the box.
Result: Hard-core gamers can get whatever version they choose to run now.
The problem with email is there is no way to verify that what you are reading really came from BillyBob@foo.com - it could have been forged at any step of the way.
What we need is the idea of a "trusted server":
1) A trusted server only accepts mail from sources it can trust:
1a) Users - users are trusted because their mail is sent via SSL, and signed with a private key the user has (with the mail server having the public key).
1b) Other mail servers: they are trusted because they sign all mail they send with their private key. The public key is available via something like a DNS TXT record for that IP.
2) The message is signed by each mail server it moves through. Thus, at any step, you can verify the mail by checking each level by getting the public key for the sender and computing an MD5 hash. If it doesn't check, then you know:
2a) The message was bogus at that point,
2b) The mail server that accepted it didn't verify the message, so
2c) That mail server can no longer be trusted.
Now, all that does is make sure that that ad for "Viagra for Goats!" originated with Ralsky@spammers.net - of itself it does not solve the problem. However, I can tell my mail server that anything coming through spammers.net is to be rejected out of hand. Also, if some chickboner sends me a spam, I know exactly where it came from and can raise hell with his ISP (and if they don't solve the problem to my satisfaction, they get blocked too.)
This is the problem with blocklists now - you can blocklist the mainsleaze spammers, but the chickboners and the relay rapers will still crapflood you worse than reading at -1.
(note: support for old clients can be supplied either by a proxy program on the client's PC, or by using a RADIUS lookup to verify that the person the mail is purportedly from matches the person authenticated on that IP.)
Logic error (as others have pointed out). Allow me to demonstrate:
Correlation is not causation.
However, that said I think people who ar turned on by kiddie porn have a problem, and people who DISTRIBUTE kiddie porn are criminals.
But let us not go down the slippery slope of incorrectly reasoning to justify our actions, 'mkay?