Microsoft software architect Don Box even wrote a song imploring de Icaza to join the company and sang it to him in front of a large audience at a party late last year.
Maybe they should have just used a stunt by Steve Ballmer instead?
Steve (onstage): "Miguel, you're a great developer... DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!"
I took the general GRE exam last year and found that the ability to type quickly worked greatly to my advantage on the essay portion of the exam. For those who aren't familiar, you're given two essay prompts, each with a time limit (I think one is 45 minutes, the other is 30 minutes).
Friends I know who aren't good typists had to have an outline on paper of what they wanted to say just 10 minutes after being given the prompt, so that they were left enough time to type out complete intro, body, and conclusion paragraphs. But sometimes ten minutes isn't enough time to fully develop the ideas of your essay (although the prompts on the GRE aren't exactly deep), so in this sutation -- regardless of how their outline looked -- they had to commit to their ideas and start typing away, just so they could turn in a complete essay.
I remember for the 45 minute essay being able to revise and flesh out my ideas on paper for 30 minutes before I started typing. Ten minutes later, I had my essay typed in a format very similar to what I had envisioned on paper. I could then spend the last five minutes for reviewing purposes.
Consequently, I got better scores than my peers on the writing portion of the exam (some of whom were English majors, and I'm a CS/EE major for crying out loud). And I think, to a large extent, my typing kills contributed to that.
I second that. I remember playing X-Wing: Alliance with my A3D card, and that was mind blowing. Based on the reverb you could actually tell whether another craft was flying above, below, or directly behind you. Then I upgraded to Win2K soon after its release, while Aureal was working on Win2K compatible drivers. They had beta drivers at the time, but they were horribly buggy and caused X-W: A to crash frequently. About this time Creative bought Aureal, and pledged to continue development on them. But we all know what really happened -- Creative assimilated Aureal's technology into their own products/drivers, and the 2K compatible drivers for Aureal's cards never got made. Last I heard, some guy actually took the 9X drivers and hacked them up to be 2K compatible. But, as you would expect, they were also buggy (although, for some users, far better than Aureal's beta offering).
In the end, in a sweet moment of irony, I managed to coax a friend running Windows 98 to swap my Turtle Beach A3D sound card for her Sound Blaster 16 (all she used it for was Winamp, anyway). I was able to play X-W: Alliance again, but sans cool sound effects and any sort of respect for Creative.
Huh. I was on campus when I found the link, and clicking on it brought me to the article. Now that I'm at home on my DSL connection, clicking on it brings me to a registration required page... Perhaps UCLA has a subscription to Nature Publishing Group, allowing me to view articles from on campus, verifying that I'm on campus by my IP address (they have one with O'Reilly, allowing me to peruse all of the O'Reilly Network Safari Bookshelf, which has come in handy more than once).
Oh well... Leave me your e-mail addy and I'll see what I can do.
The actual article to appear in Nature can be found here, which I found at the CNSI web page.
I only wish that CNSI will complete construction before I graduate with my Master's in CS... Seems like it will be a great facility to do research on this sort of thing. Oh well, there's always CENS:)
Oh yeah, in University in 1995 we sent fake email between professors...
Heh, speaking of forging e-mails from professors and university justice... That reminds me of a funny story:
A friend of mine was teased relentlessly by a student in one of her classes about the professor liking her. The professor wasn't exactly young or attractive, and he was obviously doing this just to spite her, although it wasn't always in good fun. Anyway, in a move-gone-too-far, he decided to set up his Outlook e-mail client so that his name and reply-to address were those of the professor. He then proceeded to type her an e-mail, saying how he had the hots for her and whatnot.
The problem was, he didn't type in her e-mail address correctly. And so her SMTP server bounced the e-mail back... To the real professor.
Anyway, the prof contacted the University IT department, and I don't think that relentlessly teasing student goes here anymore.
I didn't see it listed... Plus, you can see it in the International Trailer (available here).
In a shot from behind Peter, MJ asks if he loves her or not. We see that his head is level, making eye contact with her. Then, in a shot from behind MJ, Peter says he doesn't, and hangs his head. Then, from a shot behind Peter, MJ asks incredulously "you don't?" But, even though Peter is hanging his head, we see his head is level again, as if making eye contact with her. The next shot from behind MJ shows him lifting his head up.
Anyway, didn't see that in the list. Just thought I'd share. (And no, I'm not overly critical about movies... It just caught my eye the first time I watched it.)
When someone from MIT says peer-to-peer is a good thing, he's talking about peer-to-peer as an architecture. He does not mean "KaZaA 0wnz!! fr33 pr0n = 1337!!!!111oneoneone." People are interested in peer-to-peer for reasons other than file-sharing because they're scalable architectures that can handle load balancing very well, and have no central point of failure.
Most peer-to-peer research in universities regards creating better, faster Distributed Hash Tables, or DHTs for short. Typically, for N nodes on an overlay network connected by a DHT, insertion and queries come at log(N) cost. MIT has one of the best, called Chord. Some DHTs are very fragile and their routing topology can "break" when under extreme churn (when a flash of nodes suddenly join or leave the network), or malicious nodes attempt to manipulate other nodes' routing tables by creating fake identities (see the Sybil attack) -- Chord has been shown to be very resistant to both. Other notables are Kademlia from NYU (which is under the hood of eMule), and Pastry from Rice (Microsoft collaborated).
MIT has done some pioneering research in DHTs, and they have a lot of great minds on it. I'm making my own peer-to-peer program (hopefully it will be ready in a few months) and it will incorporate quite a few of the ideas they've developed. One of their ideas that I find particularly interesting (and I think should be incorporated into BitTorrent, because it seems like the perfect application) is called Vivaldi. You can read for yourself on how it works, but when applying it to BitTorrent, basicially the tracker would give you peers it thinks you have a low ping time to, as opposed to a random list which may be sub-optimal.
They're also involved in Project IRIS, which aims to develop a decentralized Internet infrastructure using all the latest DHT technology. It's funded indirectly through -- gasp -- the government via the NSF.
So yeah, don't just think that MIT is jumping on the bandwagon. They've been on the bleeding edge for some time.
You should try OpenOffice (see http://www.openoffice.org/). To keep it brief, it's like an open-source version of MS Office -- and it includes spell check.
First, it's been known for awhile that Java is a poor performer when writing to the console, for whatever reason. Second, your Java timing probably include the time to startup the VM (not that this is wrong).
If you have a program that runs for awhile (so the startup time is small compared to the time the program takes to run), and does not do intensive output to the console, then Java is a reasonable choice in my opinion. Combined with SWT, Java applications can be quite snappy (see Eclipse, Azureus), and the end user will probably never know the difference.
Just _go_. Please don't think you're too smart for college -- truth be told, no one is. If you think you are, I encourage you to go to CMU, MIT, or Caltech and be humbled by others who are just as smart as you are.
Then, once you get there, I advise you to go look for people in fields you're interested in, and mingle with them. You'll make great friends and learn a lot to boot. While I've been at UCLA, I've done the following:
Freshman year: Worked in the journalism department (school newspaper). Helped make exclusive web content for the paper. Learned some ASP, and met some people who were brilliant at English. Helped me improve my writing.
Sophomore year: Worked in the physics department. Helped automate testing for photomultiplier tubes for use in an electromagnetic calorimeter. Met some great people again, and learned a little bit of physics from grad students.
Junior year: Worked in the geology department. Wrote Matlab programs that analyze earthquake data, and wrote a program that visualizes earthquake shockwaves. Got to go do some field work on weekends for kicks. Learned a lot about earthquakes and their mechanics. Again, met great people.
Senior year: Worked in the EE department. Of all things, I got to make robots out of Legos, and program their movement using Java (the EE part comes in because the robots carry antennas...). Met some brilliant people, honed my Java skills, and hey -- I got to play with Legos as my job. w00t.
Senior year: Worked in the CS department. Hooked up with a professor for research on peer-to-peer networks. As a result, I'm quite fluent in all state-of-the-art p2p topologies -- Chord, Pastry, Kademlia, Koorde, etc. They're things I never would have learned about otherwise, most likely. Oh yeah, brilliant people, fun job, yada yada yada. Plus, it's got me making my own state of the art peer to peer program on the side (by the end of summer, Freenet and eMule had better watch out;)
Anyway, my point is -- there's so much freakin cool stuff for you to do at college. People who are smarter than you (oh yes, get off your high horse -- at college, they do exist!) doing things you've never even dreamed about. Go out and explore. Help them with what they're doing.
I don't understand why the open source community is so anti-Java. Now after reading that sentence don't think I'm leading into a rant against that anti-Java mentality. Instead, I'm pleading ignorance here -- I just want someone to enlighten me:)
Even though the Java API & implementation are controlled by Sun, why should that discourage OSS developers from writing software in it? If you can still release your source code freely while the Java VM remains free for download, what's the harm?
Case in point, Azureus is a great BitTorrent client/server written in Java, and released under the GPL. As its source code is made freely available, it receives the same feedback as other GPL'd programs receive developed for an open source language.
And just recently, I've found Java useful for controlling my Lego Mindstorms robots (see Lejos) to making my own peer-to-peer program (working on it in my spare time... coming soon, hopefully). I'll be releasing all the source code for these projects online, under the GPL -- isn't that what really matters?
Dead people insisting that people worship them? And how might they, uh, express this desire?
And if any one mathematician deserves to be honored, Euclid is as good a choice as any. It's rare that one individual makes so many mathematical discoveries that are all so fundamental or important to our understanding of the sciences.
As an example, traditional RSA encryption relies on the Euclidian algorithm to calculate the inverse of the encryption exponent (which is the decryption exponent).
I've been playing poker for just over a year now, but I can almost always win or break even simply by playing rationally and calculating approximate odds in my head. It only works to a point, but a lot of people who play don't use probability and will play trash hands that they shouldn't normally play -- and this is where you can make your killing.
The basic idea is this: Count how many cards are your "outs," or cards that make favorable hands that you are most likely to win. Then count how many cards are hidden from your view. From this, you can calculate your odds of making your outs.
If it is your turn to bet, and the ratio of the size of the pot to what you must bet is greater than the odds of making your outs, it's mathematically good for you in the long haul to bet. It's called expectation.
For example, if I can win 100 dollars by only putting in a 1 dollar bet, and the odds against me are only 3:1, it sounds good, right? (Note 100/1 gt 3/1.) But if I can only win 3 dollars by putting in a 1 dollar bet, and the odds against me are 100:1, it would be a big mistake. (Note 3/1 lt 100/1.)
But don't go to Vegas thinking you'll win thousands with this little trick. That's all it is -- a little trick, and poker veterans (which I am DEFINITELY NOT) take it for granted.
It would be interesting to see how these guys do against, the top of the US/European gaming professionals.
The US is very competitive in FPS games, but in the RTS genre, we tend to get our butts kicked.
My freshman year in college, a guy on the floor above me was ranked #1 on the US West Starcraft server. From time to time he went onto US East and destroyed people there too. I remember very well one night where six players (including me) on our floor engaged him and his friend (who was on par with us six) in a 6 on 2 battle. They decimated us, sadly to say (I thought strength in numbers would have done it, but once one of us fell, it was practically over).
We asked him whether he had participated in any international tournaments, and he said no, simply because he was not competitive enough. Sometimes he went to go visit his cousins in Korea, who were also Starcraft veterans. He said he was about the same skill as they were, so he won about half the matches against them. But whenever his cousins played in Starcraft tournaments over there, they never placed (although did much better than average).
He thought that if he played more, and could win consistently against his cousins, he could have had a shot at placing in Starcraft tournaments in Korea to win money. But that would have distracted him from school, which was still his top priority, so he never did.
'It took Adam Arkin and David Schaffer just $200,000 and a grad student to develop a potential treatment for AIDS. And that scares them.'
I suspect it took a lot more money and people than that -- let's not forget the billions of dollars and millions of man hours that went into the effort to effectively combat AIDS before this?
Often we hit upon success not by knowing to look, but by knowing where not to look based on the work of our predecessors.
Is bittorrent suited for slashdot size downloading?
BitTorrent is ideal for Slashdot-size downloading. Typically hordes of users trying to download a file at the same time works against you -- with BitTorrent, it works for you, since everyone downloading the file can also distribute it prior to its completion.
If your download is slow, I'd first say be patient and see if it improves. If that doesn't work, make sure that ports 6881 - 6999 are open on your firewall/NAT (typically they aren't for DSL/cable users). If they aren't, your firewall/NAT is interfering with normal BitTorrent operation, because can only find new peers to download from by getting their IP addresses from the tracker. If they are open, however, you can find new peers by getting their IP addresses from the tracker and by them connecting to you (since they received your IP address from the tracker). After opening/forwarding these ports, its not uncommon for people to double their download speed.
911: 911 Emergency line Slashdot user: I just lost all Internet!!! 911: Excuse me? Slashdot user: I was just about to first post to Slashdot, and I clicked "Submit," and nothing happened. I tried to ping them to see if I was dreaming, but got nothing, so I tracerouted and found out I couldn't get past localhost. 911: I don't understa... Slashdot user: My god, this first post would have done wonders for my karma! And now I've been beaten by a goatsex troll... 911: Sir, this line is used strictly for emerencies... Slashdot user: THIS IS AN EMERGENCY, DAMN IT!!! Send ambulences! DSL repairmen! Cowboyneal! I won't leave this computer until I get my Internet back, and I only have half a can of Mountain Dew to live on till then!
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft software architect Don Box even wrote a song imploring de Icaza to join the company and sang it to him in front of a large audience at a party late last year.
Maybe they should have just used a stunt by Steve Ballmer instead?
Steve (onstage): "Miguel, you're a great developer... DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!"
- sm
I took the general GRE exam last year and found that the ability to type quickly worked greatly to my advantage on the essay portion of the exam. For those who aren't familiar, you're given two essay prompts, each with a time limit (I think one is 45 minutes, the other is 30 minutes).
Friends I know who aren't good typists had to have an outline on paper of what they wanted to say just 10 minutes after being given the prompt, so that they were left enough time to type out complete intro, body, and conclusion paragraphs. But sometimes ten minutes isn't enough time to fully develop the ideas of your essay (although the prompts on the GRE aren't exactly deep), so in this sutation -- regardless of how their outline looked -- they had to commit to their ideas and start typing away, just so they could turn in a complete essay.
I remember for the 45 minute essay being able to revise and flesh out my ideas on paper for 30 minutes before I started typing. Ten minutes later, I had my essay typed in a format very similar to what I had envisioned on paper. I could then spend the last five minutes for reviewing purposes.
Consequently, I got better scores than my peers on the writing portion of the exam (some of whom were English majors, and I'm a CS/EE major for crying out loud). And I think, to a large extent, my typing kills contributed to that.
I second that. I remember playing X-Wing: Alliance with my A3D card, and that was mind blowing. Based on the reverb you could actually tell whether another craft was flying above, below, or directly behind you. Then I upgraded to Win2K soon after its release, while Aureal was working on Win2K compatible drivers. They had beta drivers at the time, but they were horribly buggy and caused X-W: A to crash frequently. About this time Creative bought Aureal, and pledged to continue development on them. But we all know what really happened -- Creative assimilated Aureal's technology into their own products/drivers, and the 2K compatible drivers for Aureal's cards never got made. Last I heard, some guy actually took the 9X drivers and hacked them up to be 2K compatible. But, as you would expect, they were also buggy (although, for some users, far better than Aureal's beta offering).
In the end, in a sweet moment of irony, I managed to coax a friend running Windows 98 to swap my Turtle Beach A3D sound card for her Sound Blaster 16 (all she used it for was Winamp, anyway). I was able to play X-W: Alliance again, but sans cool sound effects and any sort of respect for Creative.
- sm
But we're not sitting at home and watching TV and eating Pizza.
Damn straight. Now, thanks to P2P, I watch porn movies on my PC.
- sm
Huh. I was on campus when I found the link, and clicking on it brought me to the article. Now that I'm at home on my DSL connection, clicking on it brings me to a registration required page... Perhaps UCLA has a subscription to Nature Publishing Group, allowing me to view articles from on campus, verifying that I'm on campus by my IP address (they have one with O'Reilly, allowing me to peruse all of the O'Reilly Network Safari Bookshelf, which has come in handy more than once).
Oh well... Leave me your e-mail addy and I'll see what I can do.
- sm
The actual article to appear in Nature can be found here, which I found at the CNSI web page.
:)
I only wish that CNSI will complete construction before I graduate with my Master's in CS... Seems like it will be a great facility to do research on this sort of thing. Oh well, there's always CENS
- shadowmatter
Then how come when I put a two-button mouse on my grandma's Mac, and she tried to use it, her head exploded?
- sm
Oh yeah, in University in 1995 we sent fake email between professors...
Heh, speaking of forging e-mails from professors and university justice... That reminds me of a funny story:
A friend of mine was teased relentlessly by a student in one of her classes about the professor liking her. The professor wasn't exactly young or attractive, and he was obviously doing this just to spite her, although it wasn't always in good fun. Anyway, in a move-gone-too-far, he decided to set up his Outlook e-mail client so that his name and reply-to address were those of the professor. He then proceeded to type her an e-mail, saying how he had the hots for her and whatnot.
The problem was, he didn't type in her e-mail address correctly. And so her SMTP server bounced the e-mail back... To the real professor.
Anyway, the prof contacted the University IT department, and I don't think that relentlessly teasing student goes here anymore.
- sm
I didn't see it listed... Plus, you can see it in the International Trailer (available here).
In a shot from behind Peter, MJ asks if he loves her or not. We see that his head is level, making eye contact with her.
Then, in a shot from behind MJ, Peter says he doesn't, and hangs his head.
Then, from a shot behind Peter, MJ asks incredulously "you don't?" But, even though Peter is hanging his head, we see his head is level again, as if making eye contact with her.
The next shot from behind MJ shows him lifting his head up.
Anyway, didn't see that in the list. Just thought I'd share. (And no, I'm not overly critical about movies... It just caught my eye the first time I watched it.)
- sm
A Best Buy employee technically adept enough to read Slashdot?
:)
Who are you and what did you do with the REAL Best Buy employee #519-DF-688!?!
J/k
- sm
When someone from MIT says peer-to-peer is a good thing, he's talking about peer-to-peer as an architecture. He does not mean "KaZaA 0wnz!! fr33 pr0n = 1337!!!!111oneoneone." People are interested in peer-to-peer for reasons other than file-sharing because they're scalable architectures that can handle load balancing very well, and have no central point of failure.
Most peer-to-peer research in universities regards creating better, faster Distributed Hash Tables, or DHTs for short. Typically, for N nodes on an overlay network connected by a DHT, insertion and queries come at log(N) cost. MIT has one of the best, called Chord. Some DHTs are very fragile and their routing topology can "break" when under extreme churn (when a flash of nodes suddenly join or leave the network), or malicious nodes attempt to manipulate other nodes' routing tables by creating fake identities (see the Sybil attack) -- Chord has been shown to be very resistant to both. Other notables are Kademlia from NYU (which is under the hood of eMule), and Pastry from Rice (Microsoft collaborated).
MIT has done some pioneering research in DHTs, and they have a lot of great minds on it. I'm making my own peer-to-peer program (hopefully it will be ready in a few months) and it will incorporate quite a few of the ideas they've developed. One of their ideas that I find particularly interesting (and I think should be incorporated into BitTorrent, because it seems like the perfect application) is called Vivaldi. You can read for yourself on how it works, but when applying it to BitTorrent, basicially the tracker would give you peers it thinks you have a low ping time to, as opposed to a random list which may be sub-optimal.
They're also involved in Project IRIS, which aims to develop a decentralized Internet infrastructure using all the latest DHT technology. It's funded indirectly through -- gasp -- the government via the NSF.
So yeah, don't just think that MIT is jumping on the bandwagon. They've been on the bleeding edge for some time.
- shadowmatter
You should try OpenOffice (see http://www.openoffice.org/). To keep it brief, it's like an open-source version of MS Office -- and it includes spell check.
- shadowmatter
Having your blogging service totally shut you out without notice finally seems like the perfect thing to blog about.
- sm
First, it's been known for awhile that Java is a poor performer when writing to the console, for whatever reason. Second, your Java timing probably include the time to startup the VM (not that this is wrong).
If you have a program that runs for awhile (so the startup time is small compared to the time the program takes to run), and does not do intensive output to the console, then Java is a reasonable choice in my opinion. Combined with SWT, Java applications can be quite snappy (see Eclipse, Azureus), and the end user will probably never know the difference.
- shadowmatter
Just _go_. Please don't think you're too smart for college -- truth be told, no one is. If you think you are, I encourage you to go to CMU, MIT, or Caltech and be humbled by others who are just as smart as you are.
;)
Then, once you get there, I advise you to go look for people in fields you're interested in, and mingle with them. You'll make great friends and learn a lot to boot. While I've been at UCLA, I've done the following:
Freshman year: Worked in the journalism department (school newspaper). Helped make exclusive web content for the paper. Learned some ASP, and met some people who were brilliant at English. Helped me improve my writing.
Sophomore year: Worked in the physics department. Helped automate testing for photomultiplier tubes for use in an electromagnetic calorimeter. Met some great people again, and learned a little bit of physics from grad students.
Junior year: Worked in the geology department. Wrote Matlab programs that analyze earthquake data, and wrote a program that visualizes earthquake shockwaves. Got to go do some field work on weekends for kicks. Learned a lot about earthquakes and their mechanics. Again, met great people.
Senior year: Worked in the EE department. Of all things, I got to make robots out of Legos, and program their movement using Java (the EE part comes in because the robots carry antennas...). Met some brilliant people, honed my Java skills, and hey -- I got to play with Legos as my job. w00t.
Senior year: Worked in the CS department. Hooked up with a professor for research on peer-to-peer networks. As a result, I'm quite fluent in all state-of-the-art p2p topologies -- Chord, Pastry, Kademlia, Koorde, etc. They're things I never would have learned about otherwise, most likely. Oh yeah, brilliant people, fun job, yada yada yada. Plus, it's got me making my own state of the art peer to peer program on the side (by the end of summer, Freenet and eMule had better watch out
Anyway, my point is -- there's so much freakin cool stuff for you to do at college. People who are smarter than you (oh yes, get off your high horse -- at college, they do exist!) doing things you've never even dreamed about. Go out and explore. Help them with what they're doing.
Make a difference, and have fun at the same time.
- sm
I don't understand why the open source community is so anti-Java. Now after reading that sentence don't think I'm leading into a rant against that anti-Java mentality. Instead, I'm pleading ignorance here -- I just want someone to enlighten me :)
:)
Even though the Java API & implementation are controlled by Sun, why should that discourage OSS developers from writing software in it? If you can still release your source code freely while the Java VM remains free for download, what's the harm?
Case in point, Azureus is a great BitTorrent client/server written in Java, and released under the GPL. As its source code is made freely available, it receives the same feedback as other GPL'd programs receive developed for an open source language.
And just recently, I've found Java useful for controlling my Lego Mindstorms robots (see Lejos) to making my own peer-to-peer program (working on it in my spare time... coming soon, hopefully). I'll be releasing all the source code for these projects online, under the GPL -- isn't that what really matters?
Again, I'm just ignorant. Please enlighten me!
- sm
Dead people insisting that people worship them? And how might they, uh, express this desire?
And if any one mathematician deserves to be honored, Euclid is as good a choice as any. It's rare that one individual makes so many mathematical discoveries that are all so fundamental or important to our understanding of the sciences.
As an example, traditional RSA encryption relies on the Euclidian algorithm to calculate the inverse of the encryption exponent (which is the decryption exponent).
- sm
I agree.
I've been playing poker for just over a year now, but I can almost always win or break even simply by playing rationally and calculating approximate odds in my head. It only works to a point, but a lot of people who play don't use probability and will play trash hands that they shouldn't normally play -- and this is where you can make your killing.
The basic idea is this: Count how many cards are your "outs," or cards that make favorable hands that you are most likely to win. Then count how many cards are hidden from your view. From this, you can calculate your odds of making your outs.
If it is your turn to bet, and the ratio of the size of the pot to what you must bet is greater than the odds of making your outs, it's mathematically good for you in the long haul to bet. It's called expectation.
For example, if I can win 100 dollars by only putting in a 1 dollar bet, and the odds against me are only 3:1, it sounds good, right? (Note 100/1 gt 3/1.) But if I can only win 3 dollars by putting in a 1 dollar bet, and the odds against me are 100:1, it would be a big mistake. (Note 3/1 lt 100/1.)
But don't go to Vegas thinking you'll win thousands with this little trick. That's all it is -- a little trick, and poker veterans (which I am DEFINITELY NOT) take it for granted.
- shadowmatter
It would be interesting to see how these guys do against, the top of the US/European gaming professionals.
The US is very competitive in FPS games, but in the RTS genre, we tend to get our butts kicked.
My freshman year in college, a guy on the floor above me was ranked #1 on the US West Starcraft server. From time to time he went onto US East and destroyed people there too. I remember very well one night where six players (including me) on our floor engaged him and his friend (who was on par with us six) in a 6 on 2 battle. They decimated us, sadly to say (I thought strength in numbers would have done it, but once one of us fell, it was practically over).
We asked him whether he had participated in any international tournaments, and he said no, simply because he was not competitive enough. Sometimes he went to go visit his cousins in Korea, who were also Starcraft veterans. He said he was about the same skill as they were, so he won about half the matches against them. But whenever his cousins played in Starcraft tournaments over there, they never placed (although did much better than average).
He thought that if he played more, and could win consistently against his cousins, he could have had a shot at placing in Starcraft tournaments in Korea to win money. But that would have distracted him from school, which was still his top priority, so he never did.
- shadowmatter
'It took Adam Arkin and David Schaffer just $200,000 and a grad student to develop a potential treatment for AIDS. And that scares them.'
I suspect it took a lot more money and people than that -- let's not forget the billions of dollars and millions of man hours that went into the effort to effectively combat AIDS before this?
Often we hit upon success not by knowing to look, but by knowing where not to look based on the work of our predecessors.
- sm
True to Microsoft tradition, looking at the concept model here, it appears that Bill's building has already crashed.
Thanks folks, I'll be here all night...
- sm
His analogy reminds me of that Homer Simpson quote:
"I'm like a chocoholic, only with booze."
- sm
Is bittorrent suited for slashdot size downloading?
BitTorrent is ideal for Slashdot-size downloading. Typically hordes of users trying to download a file at the same time works against you -- with BitTorrent, it works for you, since everyone downloading the file can also distribute it prior to its completion.
If your download is slow, I'd first say be patient and see if it improves. If that doesn't work, make sure that ports 6881 - 6999 are open on your firewall/NAT (typically they aren't for DSL/cable users). If they aren't, your firewall/NAT is interfering with normal BitTorrent operation, because can only find new peers to download from by getting their IP addresses from the tracker. If they are open, however, you can find new peers by getting their IP addresses from the tracker and by them connecting to you (since they received your IP address from the tracker). After opening/forwarding these ports, its not uncommon for people to double their download speed.
- sm
911: 911 Emergency line
Slashdot user: I just lost all Internet!!!
911: Excuse me?
Slashdot user: I was just about to first post to Slashdot, and I clicked "Submit," and nothing happened. I tried to ping them to see if I was dreaming, but got nothing, so I tracerouted and found out I couldn't get past localhost.
911: I don't understa...
Slashdot user: My god, this first post would have done wonders for my karma! And now I've been beaten by a goatsex troll...
911: Sir, this line is used strictly for emerencies...
Slashdot user: THIS IS AN EMERGENCY, DAMN IT!!! Send ambulences! DSL repairmen! Cowboyneal! I won't leave this computer until I get my Internet back, and I only have half a can of Mountain Dew to live on till then!
Whole warehouses of infected PCs for sale? Sweet. I think I'm gonna hit up this place right after I swing by the used syringe lot.
- sm