The duelist bots are optimised to fight in a way that's patently unrealistic for someone playing some game like Doom. In fact, many times games have to make enemies use lousy tactics just to make the game practical. You know how many of those stealth games would be beatable if the enemies even used a buddy system?
Much of the issue is also the amount of damage the player takes compared to the enemy. I'm an even match for an Adept enemy in UT2004 because they have equal HP to me. If they fell to a tenth of the damage I do (or I wasted more time practicing), I'd be able to go much higher.
That's an English version old German technique where, if you're writing some article, and are over the word-count, just take out spaces until it fits (aka Shaffungvonneuwurden or something along those lines)
I agree that you've mentioned a very big part of the problem as well, and in fact, I think that GC6, one of the grand challenges in there deals simply with reliability. I can see things improving to a point where people would be more willing to rely on them, like on today's cars and aircraft. I just don't see it happening cheaply with today's software engineering techniques.
Processing power doesn't drive innovation as some claim a lack of it drives efficiency. Even if, in fifteen years, we've got computers with a thousand times the circuitry, programs will run just as fast as they do today, and what we use it for will generally be the same. What innovations do occur seem to be folded back into existing technology, making it better. This looks at innovations that do more than just make a better search engine, and change how we look at the computer.
Ubiquitous computing is an interesting completely transformational view of how we look at computers. Back in the early 1900s, people bought accessories for their electric motors. They were simply too expensive to put a seperate one in each appliance, so if you wanted a vaccuum cleaner, you'd buy the attachment that turned your motor into a vacuum cleaner. Now, you buy something with an electric motor, and odds are that they don't even mention one's in there. The difficult part of ubiquitous computing isn't cheap, powerful computers; that's solved. The difficult part is getting everything to work together and handle stuff that doesn't want to work together nicely. What do you do when you are given some request that you don't know how to handle? Do you ignore it, or do you pass it off to someone who knows how to handle it? If it's something that you've never even heard of before, then would you know who to hand it off to? What you need is some sort of protocol that's expandable, universal, and standardized, and a computing framework that's capable of handling it.
No matter what anybody says, XML isn't sufficient. Objects in the framework need to be capable of broadcasting their capabilities, and other objects need to know how to use those capabilities. It would be nice if we even had that in an individual computer right now. If something needs to show a picture, it should be able to find the program that does that without the user needing to tell it that. Figure that out, and the world will beat a path to your door.
You can compress it using gzip, which I'd assume would be part of the process. I'd guess that you would have some file like foo.src.gz, and when you open it in emacs, it's automatically turned into the format you want. It's certainly an interesting idea, and even if it isn't compressed standard, any distribution of the source code certainly would do so.
Or, as others have said: "Premature Optimization is the root of all sorts of evils." You don't want to think of the number of problems that could have been averted if someone had thought to write out their algorithm simply and abstractly first. Then they could profile it, find where the bottlenecks are, and fix them. Most of the 'carefully hand optimized' code of yesteryear was shotgun optimization: Try speeding things up until the program actually runs fast. By the time they finally hit the actual problem or got the speed to a reasonable level, they'd already gone through most of the code. You think they'd have done that if they knew that it was screen updates taking up 95% of their processor time? I don't think so.
Frankly, compared to some colossal tomb for your god-emperor, it's not that big of a waste of money. Nobody said a wonder of the world had to be practical. (Hell, for that matter nobody said that they could be practical.)
They were sort of stuck with what they had. They had a ~10 year-old zeppelin hangar, which was set up to be climate controlled, a large foundation that they didn't want to screw with too much. They've been looking at starting to replace the current canopy with one that's transparent, or at least translucent. However, it takes time and not a small amount of effort to fix up a building which is 1000' long and 300' high for something it wasn't really meant for. I mean, it's an engineering feat which would border on the ludicrous even 50 years ago, which nowadays is so ho-hum. You could fit six of the seven wonders of the ancient world in the thing and still have room to squeeze the Hagia Sophia and the Brooklyn Bridge in. By any measure, it's pretty damn impressive.
Partly the problem with peer review by the masses is that lots, if not most of the information in the Wikipedia is pretty damn obscure. Open source programs have one basic thing in common. They're all programs, and all of the contributors are programmers. If Wikipedia is to be trusted and still be open, then it needs to be open to any person who is either expert or trained in the field. Frankly, the current system is allowing someone to shove the following into the kernel source unreviewed
void* malloc(int foo)
{
return null;
}
I hope that you'd agree that some tripe like that isn't going to help things. We've got an advantage in open source programming in that you can ask any contributor, and odds are that they have some knowledge of programming, but if you were to ask your average programmer if Debbie Harry sang for the Human League, you'd get a blank stare.
Well, going in without a transmitter will get lots of very agitated people going after you. Keep it up and you might get anything from a coastguard boarding party to a friggin' antiship missile. (The US military is infamous for being trigger happy, and I'm sure that the USCG will do us proud in that regard.) In fifty words or less, don't buck the system unless you have a deathwish or enjoy really long prison terms.
Well, since your Indian village can only be 100 meters away from a repeater, may I suggest a really damn long power cord? Or are you talking thicknet, where you could go a whole quarter mile before you need a repeater? Yeah, let's put a friggin' router in every village. That shouldn't cost us too much.
I was thinking something similar. Multi-file RSS with hashing. Of course, this isn't my area of expertise (or even competence), so this may be a little stupid.
OK, suppose you ping some website with my proposed system. It gets the request, and sends back a list of the hashes of the current article files. Your computer hashes your files, and then it sends back the hashes which don't match up. Those are the files you don't have. The server then ships the files back to you, and you have your blog fix, or whatever it is.
There are some possible problems. One, you can still ask for the hashes every few seconds. I'd just set up some system where you automagically ban any IP address that's doing that. Two, you could send back nonsense hashes, which would be akin to asking for files that aren't there. Three, it seems like I'm reinventing the wheel here. Any informed (or uninformed) opinions?
Every group has fundamentalists. It seems crazy, but it's the only way to explain this phenomenon. If you want to know how really perverse this is, ask what they think about evolution, and how they think that there's no contradiction. Slashdotters are probably one of the most odd groups out there, by far. Pro-science until it gets in the way of their world-views, at which point they take the path of least resistance.
F'instance, the recent article discussing the effects of computers on education. The Slashdot Conventional Wisdom is that computers are a positive influence wherever they aren't used to infringe on somebody's rights. Since some kid having 24/7 access to a computer doesn't infringe on anybody's rights, then it must be a good thing, right?
The vast majority of the responses were anecdotes about how the poster used computers eighteen hours a day, and ended up valedectorian. (If I may digress, I used the computer almost that much, and I found out that I graduated with honors at the podium.) The few people who were willing to accept the heretical belief that it wasn't helping hypothesized that it was simply too much of a good thing, or information overload.
Personally, I don't bother dealing with some crusade against the Slashdot echo-chamber. If they want to think that Plutonium is so safe that you can eat it by the pound and not get sick and that there's some guy out there writing malicious software that has the same MD5 hash as the stuff it impersonates, then fine with me. I just avoid the Ayn Rand porn and stick to the topics that interest me.
It's meant to be more secure. Microsoft doesn't know what you're doing with the damn thing, so it chooses the most secure option, so you can set up the server, start downloading things like patches, and then, when it's ready for prime time, open it up for business.
Offline is more than just your computer's stopped or the connection is cut, it's any time that your server isn't serving. And as a rule of thumb, when your computer is offline, you don't want it responding to requests. You wouldn't want some schmuck trying to access your Domain Server while you've got the permissions wide open, now would you?
Living in a place like ND or SD means that your costs of living are much lower than living in some place like NYC, where the salaries are going to work out to nearly twice as much simply due to the sheer cost of housing. Also, try expanding a school in a major city. It's going to cost you some ludicrous amount of money due to the land prices.
What I'd like to see is the Numbers worked out with PPP, or purchasing power parity, which is a better idea of how much wealth a country has. The US spends about $1700 per capita on education. Doing some crunching using the Economist World in Figures booklet, the Czech Republic spends about the equivalent of $650 per capita on education, while in Norway, it's closer to $2100. That's in PPP corrected numbers, so it irons out some of the disparities. I still need some way to figure out what percentage of their population is in school to figure out what the per-student spending is.
For people interested in my methodology, I started by taking the US Per Capita GDP, ($35,200) and multiplying by a percentage multiplier for that country's PPP compared to the US, (which is 1.00). I then multiplied by the percentage of GDP spent on education, and that gave me the number I listed. I only listed a few, since I have to figure the numbers out by hand. YMMV, etc.
Well, for people who use these sorts of chips, this data can be useful. SRAM chips aren't used for main system memory, but is useful as cache. While you could make some computer with only SRAM, nobody would consider doing it, due to the expense. However, knowing this is useful for any chip makers, who might want to figure out how much area to budget out for. So you could figure that you want 256 Cache lines, two-way associative, with 16 32-bit words per line. That's going to be about 128kb, and the control circuitry is going to take up a good bit more than that. If you could shove 512Mb on a chip, then this would take about.025% of the area before control circuits. It gives you an idea of what you can do.
So for a chip designer, who this press release is meant for, this is relevant information.
No.
There is no way in Hell that that would happen if the financial institutions aren't sleeping. Their entire business is predicated on being able to send data confidentially. When bank A needs an overnight loan from bank B, they want to make absolutely certain that it goes through properly, since millions of dollars are on the line in that single transaction. They do not want anyone and I mean anyone fucking around with that, and if the RIAA gets some idiotic idea to outlaw that, heads will roll.
The RIAA and the MPAA also use encryption to protect their IP from infringement, and they don't want to lose that either. In other words, encryption isn't going anywhere, period.
Slashdot Mirror
It crashes IE5. You call it a bug, I call it a feature.
Much of the issue is also the amount of damage the player takes compared to the enemy. I'm an even match for an Adept enemy in UT2004 because they have equal HP to me. If they fell to a tenth of the damage I do (or I wasted more time practicing), I'd be able to go much higher.
That's an English version old German technique where, if you're writing some article, and are over the word-count, just take out spaces until it fits (aka Shaffungvonneuwurden or something along those lines)
I agree that you've mentioned a very big part of the problem as well, and in fact, I think that GC6, one of the grand challenges in there deals simply with reliability. I can see things improving to a point where people would be more willing to rely on them, like on today's cars and aircraft. I just don't see it happening cheaply with today's software engineering techniques.
Ubiquitous computing is an interesting completely transformational view of how we look at computers. Back in the early 1900s, people bought accessories for their electric motors. They were simply too expensive to put a seperate one in each appliance, so if you wanted a vaccuum cleaner, you'd buy the attachment that turned your motor into a vacuum cleaner. Now, you buy something with an electric motor, and odds are that they don't even mention one's in there. The difficult part of ubiquitous computing isn't cheap, powerful computers; that's solved. The difficult part is getting everything to work together and handle stuff that doesn't want to work together nicely. What do you do when you are given some request that you don't know how to handle? Do you ignore it, or do you pass it off to someone who knows how to handle it? If it's something that you've never even heard of before, then would you know who to hand it off to? What you need is some sort of protocol that's expandable, universal, and standardized, and a computing framework that's capable of handling it.
No matter what anybody says, XML isn't sufficient. Objects in the framework need to be capable of broadcasting their capabilities, and other objects need to know how to use those capabilities. It would be nice if we even had that in an individual computer right now. If something needs to show a picture, it should be able to find the program that does that without the user needing to tell it that. Figure that out, and the world will beat a path to your door.
It'll seat whatever you've got lying around the house, as long as you use enough force...
You can compress it using gzip, which I'd assume would be part of the process. I'd guess that you would have some file like foo.src.gz, and when you open it in emacs, it's automatically turned into the format you want. It's certainly an interesting idea, and even if it isn't compressed standard, any distribution of the source code certainly would do so.
T@|The first sign of unintelligent life in outer space.
Or, as others have said: "Premature Optimization is the root of all sorts of evils." You don't want to think of the number of problems that could have been averted if someone had thought to write out their algorithm simply and abstractly first. Then they could profile it, find where the bottlenecks are, and fix them. Most of the 'carefully hand optimized' code of yesteryear was shotgun optimization: Try speeding things up until the program actually runs fast. By the time they finally hit the actual problem or got the speed to a reasonable level, they'd already gone through most of the code. You think they'd have done that if they knew that it was screen updates taking up 95% of their processor time? I don't think so.
I think that the rest of the EU will disagree with you on that one....
Frankly, compared to some colossal tomb for your god-emperor, it's not that big of a waste of money. Nobody said a wonder of the world had to be practical. (Hell, for that matter nobody said that they could be practical.)
They were sort of stuck with what they had. They had a ~10 year-old zeppelin hangar, which was set up to be climate controlled, a large foundation that they didn't want to screw with too much. They've been looking at starting to replace the current canopy with one that's transparent, or at least translucent. However, it takes time and not a small amount of effort to fix up a building which is 1000' long and 300' high for something it wasn't really meant for. I mean, it's an engineering feat which would border on the ludicrous even 50 years ago, which nowadays is so ho-hum. You could fit six of the seven wonders of the ancient world in the thing and still have room to squeeze the Hagia Sophia and the Brooklyn Bridge in. By any measure, it's pretty damn impressive.
Partly the problem with peer review by the masses is that lots, if not most of the information in the Wikipedia is pretty damn obscure. Open source programs have one basic thing in common. They're all programs, and all of the contributors are programmers. If Wikipedia is to be trusted and still be open, then it needs to be open to any person who is either expert or trained in the field. Frankly, the current system is allowing someone to shove the following into the kernel source unreviewed
void* malloc(int foo) { return null; }
I hope that you'd agree that some tripe like that isn't going to help things. We've got an advantage in open source programming in that you can ask any contributor, and odds are that they have some knowledge of programming, but if you were to ask your average programmer if Debbie Harry sang for the Human League, you'd get a blank stare.
Well, going in without a transmitter will get lots of very agitated people going after you. Keep it up and you might get anything from a coastguard boarding party to a friggin' antiship missile. (The US military is infamous for being trigger happy, and I'm sure that the USCG will do us proud in that regard.) In fifty words or less, don't buck the system unless you have a deathwish or enjoy really long prison terms.
"Yeah, really! It was the network printer saturating the SONET link!"
Well, since your Indian village can only be 100 meters away from a repeater, may I suggest a really damn long power cord? Or are you talking thicknet, where you could go a whole quarter mile before you need a repeater? Yeah, let's put a friggin' router in every village. That shouldn't cost us too much.
OK, suppose you ping some website with my proposed system. It gets the request, and sends back a list of the hashes of the current article files. Your computer hashes your files, and then it sends back the hashes which don't match up. Those are the files you don't have. The server then ships the files back to you, and you have your blog fix, or whatever it is.
There are some possible problems. One, you can still ask for the hashes every few seconds. I'd just set up some system where you automagically ban any IP address that's doing that. Two, you could send back nonsense hashes, which would be akin to asking for files that aren't there. Three, it seems like I'm reinventing the wheel here. Any informed (or uninformed) opinions?
F'instance, the recent article discussing the effects of computers on education. The Slashdot Conventional Wisdom is that computers are a positive influence wherever they aren't used to infringe on somebody's rights. Since some kid having 24/7 access to a computer doesn't infringe on anybody's rights, then it must be a good thing, right?
The vast majority of the responses were anecdotes about how the poster used computers eighteen hours a day, and ended up valedectorian. (If I may digress, I used the computer almost that much, and I found out that I graduated with honors at the podium.) The few people who were willing to accept the heretical belief that it wasn't helping hypothesized that it was simply too much of a good thing, or information overload.
Personally, I don't bother dealing with some crusade against the Slashdot echo-chamber. If they want to think that Plutonium is so safe that you can eat it by the pound and not get sick and that there's some guy out there writing malicious software that has the same MD5 hash as the stuff it impersonates, then fine with me. I just avoid the Ayn Rand porn and stick to the topics that interest me.
Offline is more than just your computer's stopped or the connection is cut, it's any time that your server isn't serving. And as a rule of thumb, when your computer is offline, you don't want it responding to requests. You wouldn't want some schmuck trying to access your Domain Server while you've got the permissions wide open, now would you?
What I'd like to see is the Numbers worked out with PPP, or purchasing power parity, which is a better idea of how much wealth a country has. The US spends about $1700 per capita on education. Doing some crunching using the Economist World in Figures booklet, the Czech Republic spends about the equivalent of $650 per capita on education, while in Norway, it's closer to $2100. That's in PPP corrected numbers, so it irons out some of the disparities. I still need some way to figure out what percentage of their population is in school to figure out what the per-student spending is.
For people interested in my methodology, I started by taking the US Per Capita GDP, ($35,200) and multiplying by a percentage multiplier for that country's PPP compared to the US, (which is 1.00). I then multiplied by the percentage of GDP spent on education, and that gave me the number I listed. I only listed a few, since I have to figure the numbers out by hand. YMMV, etc.
So for a chip designer, who this press release is meant for, this is relevant information.
I'm reading this during class.
The RIAA and the MPAA also use encryption to protect their IP from infringement, and they don't want to lose that either. In other words, encryption isn't going anywhere, period.
That movie sucked cock so bad it killed Raul Julia.
Somebody's got to run Iraq.