Now Nokia trying to recrut open source/ hobby developers to it's case for Linux tablet. That is very similar to what it done with Symbian OS before.
Nokia promoted it with Free SDK's and open API. recruting small and hobby developers. However, as Symbian OS secured it's domination in the smartphone market, each year Symbian/Nokia started taking omething away. First came Symbian Signed for signing application. First it was promised that there will be free Symbian Signed option for non-commertial/educational applications, but we have never seen it. Next - expensive Nokia Premium service. And now Version 9 of Simbian OS, which close big purt of API (including input API) for non-licensed developers. Nokia can do the same with Linux - just add it's proprietary user interface on top of the OS and leave it closed. Not at once of case, only after it's tablet take foothold on the market.
Or may be I just paranoid.
The lag would be completely unbareable is hardly noticeable for web surfing but for a system sending an update of several dozens of users each 2-3 seconds is a killer.
I don't think the real lag would be worse then with normal server based MMORPG. The thing is, to play a game you have to interact not only with server, but with other client. Whatever lag other client have will affect you too while you are interacting with it in the normal MMORPG. In the central server case clients connect through the server. In the distributed case they connect directly. The latter case should be faster.
Of cause enviroment synchronization will be more difficalt.
A lot of these embedded machines run Java-based software now. If it can run Java it doesn't matter what OS is underneath it. Sure, the JVM and the OS may have differing levels of protection depending on the device, but as I said... Java is the key.
From what I understand (from my limited reading becuase I don't really give a flying fuck... nothing I own has Bluetooth for a very good reason) these cellphone virii rely on the Java compatibility to work.
No, Symian viruses (like Cabir) does not rely on the Java. Java viruses can not exist becuse of limeted functionality of the J2ME . Symbian "viruses" have nothing to do with JVM and can not infect so called "Java phones". In fact they hardly can infect Symbian phones. This story with repeted "yes, no" spamming sounds lame to me. Why not turn off bluetooth after the first attempt ? Or turn off discovery mode for bluetooth ? And don't tell me about clueless user. Clueless user wouldn't know how to turn bluetooth on.
Microsoft may prevent Symbian OS from becoming a monoculture or at least put some competitive pressure. Left by itself Symbian can become closed and developer unfriendly.
This is another reason I would like to someday see "open" phones.
Almoste all Symbian OS phones are "open" . You can download SDK and code in C++ to you pleasure. There are even few open source Symbian projects on Sourceforge (most notable OpenGL ES implementaion). In fact I myself enetertain idea to write morse input for my phone, I just too busy with other projects (games of cause:) ) However next versions of Symbian may be closed (Symbian evolve in that direction) - operators don't want people loading applications without paying them and pressure phone manufacturers.
OGRE and already mentioned Crystal Space are two most popular open sourced 3d engines, but OGRE community seems more active lately. Here is a summary of OGRE vs Crystal Space
Well, you can implement cheaper and less robast hand-tracking camera system with little coding using open sourced Augmented reality system - ARToolkit.
Put small ARToolkit markers on the gloves as described at this article (photo,
and implement some gesture recognition (for example that one )
Personally, I think Sokal would have done everyone, and especially the readers of Social Text, a huge favour by not publishig the retraction until a couple of years later. That would have allowed it to act as a net to fish out some deadwood.
We would have couple of new branches of science now - feminist mathematics and social chemistry...
If you are wondering, how fingers positions tracked by camera, pay attention to small black and white squares on the end of the fingers. Those are square-shaped markers used in the ARToolkit - Open sourced, multiplatform Augmented reality library. ARToolkit is esy to use and with camera connected to PC and having camera SDK you can esily write your own augmented reality application. There are augmented relity libraries for cellular phones and pocket pc in development.
This theme is beat to death. So called "virus" require answer "Yes" three times to be installed. The most vocal reporter of these viruses is F-Secure, manufacturer of anti-virus software for symbian phones. Their CEO speaking on one of the previous virus: "somehow, I'm not sure exactly how this virus get installed on my phone" He did't remember answering "Yes" three times ?
Mathematical proofs should show short, clever ways of connecting otherwise disparate concepts that are only obvious in hindsight.
Modern mathematics is very complex, important and useful theorems proven recently have huge and difficalt proofs, built from a lot of steps. Imortant results hardly have a short proofs.
Take a look at the concepts used in the one of the most famous proofs of XX centery : the Feramt last theorem. It's proof followed from the
Taniyama-Shimura theorem which establish non-obvious connection between quite different areas of mathematics. The proof is very long and complex, but of great importance for mathematics, and may have be realted to cryptography and even physics. Also such proofs are way outside of the power of near-future computers.
another service, which throwing random bookmarck
generated by "like-minded" person -
http://www.stumbleupon.com/
This one having nice firefox tool bar.
Google has login accounts, so let logged-in users have a link saying "report spam site". Track who files the most reliable reports, and if a few of those people all agree that a site is spam, nuke its pagerank.
This method will not work. First thing microsoft.com will be nuked. Google probably wouldn't want it.
John Baez, quantum gravity reseacher have an exellent list on his site of
Open questions in Physics
It includes:
sonoluminescence - plasma core in the bubbles of liquid
high temperature superconductivity
turbulence and Navier-Stokes equations -mathematic of chaos
what is meant by a "measurement" in quantum mechanics?
Does "wavefunction collapse" actually happen as a physical process ?
What happened at or before the Big Bang?
Why is there an arrow of time; that is, why is the future so much different from the past?
dark energy
dark matter
The Horizon Problem: why is the Universe almost, but not quite, homogeneous on the very largest distance scales
When were the first stars formed, and what were they like
Is the Cosmic Censorship Hypothesis true? Roughly, for generic collapsing isolated gravitational systems are the singularities that might develop guaranteed to be hidden beyond a smooth event horizon?
Why are the laws of physics not symmetrical between left and right, future and past, and between matter and antimatter?
Why is there more matter than antimatter, at least around here?
Is there really a Higgs boson, as predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics?
Why do the particles have the precise masses they do? Or is this an unanswerable question?
Are there important aspects of the Universe that can only be understood using the Anthropic Principle?
The Big Question(TM)
This last question sits on the fence between cosmology and particle physics:
* How can we merge quantum theory and general relativity to create a quantum theory of gravity? How can we test this theory?
They evaporate very fast due to Hawking_radiation
Black hole produced in the collider should have lifetime of the order of magnitude something around 1e-90 second. No danger here.
Tutorial: Machine Learning
Video game artificial intelligence has traditionally focused on simulating interesting behaviors, whether it's combat tactics, NPC interaction, stealth, or even story telling elements. In recent years, adventures, role-playing games and strategy games have shown us how sophisticated and rich game AI systems can be. Still, most of these games exhibit pre-scripted, "staged" behavior only, where character learning is a minor component, if taken into consideration at all. Adventure game characters will never remember us the second time they see us, and characters in a fighting game will seldom adapt to our fighting style through a series of combats.
Still, as CPU power increases, and player's expectations sky-rocket, learning is slowly gaining ground in the game AI development community. A solid proof of this was evident at Monday's full day tutorial on game learning techniques at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, where professors John Laird and Michael Van Lent from the University of Michigan surveyed the different machine learning techniques to a room-filling audience.
The tutorial was divided into chewable portions which, as a whole, provided a gentle but thorough overview of what machine learning (ML) is all about, the techniques and costs implied, and how games can benefit from it. Both speakers took turns, with frequent stops to allow questions from the audience, thus making a deep, complex subject easier to follow and understand.
For the first portion of the talk, both speakers tried to give basic info on what ML is, when should it be used, and when it can or should be faked. ML is an added computational cost which only benefits some scenarios, and so it should only be used where it can positively affect the gameplay, not as a hyped piece of technology. Here's a recipe that appeared several times during the talk, and very well summarizes the pros and cons of learning in AI systems:
Positive side of ML:
More interesting, believable behavior due to learning
Personalized, re-playable experience
New types of games (Black and White and The Sims come to mind)
Negative side of ML:
More difficult to predict behavior, less control for designer
May take a long time to evolve
May get stuck / be unreliable
It was interesting and refreshing to see two major league AI researchers give an unbiased, neutral opinion where ML is not the solution to all problems in the world, but just a new component that should be evaluated and used when needed.
For the longer portion of the talk, both Laird and Van Lent focused on explaining classic machine learning techniques, with emphasis on their applicability for video games. Here's a brief overview of what was covered, and the key ideas:
The first surveyed technique was classic decision trees, expanded with rule induction as the learning method. In decision trees, knowledge is represented in a tree with each node being a test, and each child node being an outcome of the test. So, by descending from root to leaves we select the exact configuration of the system, and thus the associated behavior. So, a tree may have a root that classifies characters between friendly or hostile. The second-level node may classify according to the type of weapon they are wielding, and the leaves may specify the behavior associated with each configuration (such as ENEMY with RANGED WEAPON implies FLEE behavior). Decision trees have been used in games for well over twenty years. What's interesting about them is that a number of algorithms (namely, the ID3 and the more recent C4.5 algorithm) have been devised to, given the right number of example cases, automatically build the tree by means of an induction paradigm.
An example may look something like:
= FLEE
= ATTACK
And by using ID3 on that set a tree would be built, and thus the character would automatically learn the decision criteria, correctly selecting behaviors according to that criteria. ID3 basically works recursively on the set of attributes to be used as classifiers
Check. Usenet/web groups?Contacts? Check. Add a basic wordprocessor and a few niceties...
A new version of google groups is ugly and unfriendly.
A lot of regress form deja, whic it was bought from.
If this thrend continue google end up with unfriendly, unusable platform.
Slashdot Mirror
They should include Packard-Bell into consortium.
Now Nokia trying to recrut open source/ hobby developers to it's case for Linux tablet. That is very similar to what it done with Symbian OS before. Nokia promoted it with Free SDK's and open API. recruting small and hobby developers. However, as Symbian OS secured it's domination in the smartphone market, each year Symbian/Nokia started taking omething away. First came Symbian Signed for signing application. First it was promised that there will be free Symbian Signed option for non-commertial/educational applications, but we have never seen it. Next - expensive Nokia Premium service. And now Version 9 of Simbian OS, which close big purt of API (including input API) for non-licensed developers. Nokia can do the same with Linux - just add it's proprietary user interface on top of the OS and leave it closed. Not at once of case, only after it's tablet take foothold on the market. Or may be I just paranoid.
I stand corrected, in this case it's a clearly bad design on the Symbian part. There should be delay between accepting requests.
The lag would be completely unbareable is hardly noticeable for web surfing but for a system sending an update of several dozens of users each 2-3 seconds is a killer.
I don't think the real lag would be worse then with normal server based MMORPG. The thing is, to play a game you have to interact not only with server, but with other client. Whatever lag other client have will affect you too while you are interacting with it in the normal MMORPG. In the central server case clients connect through the server. In the distributed case they connect directly. The latter case should be faster. Of cause enviroment synchronization will be more difficalt.
Microsoft may prevent Symbian OS from becoming a monoculture or at least put some competitive pressure. Left by itself Symbian can become closed and developer unfriendly.
for example
http://www.geosimcities.com/showroom_Phil.htm They were using laser to scan cityscape too.
This is another reason I would like to someday see "open" phones. Almoste all Symbian OS phones are "open" . You can download SDK and code in C++ to you pleasure. There are even few open source Symbian projects on Sourceforge (most notable OpenGL ES implementaion). In fact I myself enetertain idea to write morse input for my phone, I just too busy with other projects (games of cause
OGRE and already mentioned Crystal Space are two most popular open sourced 3d engines, but OGRE community seems more active lately. Here is a summary of OGRE vs Crystal Space
Well, you can implement cheaper and less robast hand-tracking camera system with little coding using open sourced Augmented reality system - ARToolkit. Put small ARToolkit markers on the gloves as described at this article (photo, and implement some gesture recognition (for example that one )
Personally, I think Sokal would have done everyone, and especially the readers of Social Text, a huge favour by not publishig the retraction until a couple of years later. That would have allowed it to act as a net to fish out some deadwood. We would have couple of new branches of science now - feminist mathematics and social chemistry...
If you are wondering, how fingers positions tracked by camera, pay attention to small black and white squares on the end of the fingers. Those are square-shaped markers used in the ARToolkit - Open sourced, multiplatform Augmented reality library. ARToolkit is esy to use and with camera connected to PC and having camera SDK you can esily write your own augmented reality application. There are augmented relity libraries for cellular phones and pocket pc in development.
It's already integrated with calculator. Type (case sensitive) : the answer to life, the universe, and everything =
This theme is beat to death. So called "virus" require answer "Yes" three times to be installed. The most vocal reporter of these viruses is F-Secure, manufacturer of anti-virus software for symbian phones. Their CEO speaking on one of the previous virus: "somehow, I'm not sure exactly how this virus get installed on my phone" He did't remember answering "Yes" three times ?
Mathematical proofs should show short, clever ways of connecting otherwise disparate concepts that are only obvious in hindsight. Modern mathematics is very complex, important and useful theorems proven recently have huge and difficalt proofs, built from a lot of steps. Imortant results hardly have a short proofs.
Take a look at the concepts used in the one of the most famous proofs of XX centery : the Feramt last theorem. It's proof followed from the Taniyama-Shimura theorem which establish non-obvious connection between quite different areas of mathematics. The proof is very long and complex, but of great importance for mathematics, and may have be realted to cryptography and even physics. Also such proofs are way outside of the power of near-future computers.
I routinely read books on my Nokia 6600, while on the bus, or waiting etc. I convert them into txt and read with ReadM - free text reader.
I for one welcome our new Roland Piquepaille overlords !
another service, which throwing random bookmarck generated by "like-minded" person - http://www.stumbleupon.com/ This one having nice firefox tool bar.
Google has login accounts, so let logged-in users have a link saying "report spam site". Track who files the most reliable reports, and if a few of those people all agree that a site is spam, nuke its pagerank. This method will not work. First thing microsoft.com will be nuked. Google probably wouldn't want it.
Let AI just take over their world ! Mwahahaha
John Baez, quantum gravity reseacher have an exellent list on his site of Open questions in Physics
It includes:
sonoluminescence - plasma core in the bubbles of liquid
high temperature superconductivity
turbulence and Navier-Stokes equations -mathematic of chaos
what is meant by a "measurement" in quantum mechanics? Does "wavefunction collapse" actually happen as a physical process ?
What happened at or before the Big Bang?
Why is there an arrow of time; that is, why is the future so much different from the past?
dark energy
dark matter
The Horizon Problem: why is the Universe almost, but not quite, homogeneous on the very largest distance scales
When were the first stars formed, and what were they like
Is the Cosmic Censorship Hypothesis true? Roughly, for generic collapsing isolated gravitational systems are the singularities that might develop guaranteed to be hidden beyond a smooth event horizon?
Why are the laws of physics not symmetrical between left and right, future and past, and between matter and antimatter?
Why is there more matter than antimatter, at least around here?
Is there really a Higgs boson, as predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics?
Why do the particles have the precise masses they do? Or is this an unanswerable question?
Are there important aspects of the Universe that can only be understood using the Anthropic Principle?
The Big Question(TM)
This last question sits on the fence between cosmology and particle physics:
* How can we merge quantum theory and general relativity to create a quantum theory of gravity? How can we test this theory?
They evaporate very fast due to Hawking_radiation Black hole produced in the collider should have lifetime of the order of magnitude something around 1e-90 second. No danger here.
Tutorial: Machine Learning Video game artificial intelligence has traditionally focused on simulating interesting behaviors, whether it's combat tactics, NPC interaction, stealth, or even story telling elements. In recent years, adventures, role-playing games and strategy games have shown us how sophisticated and rich game AI systems can be. Still, most of these games exhibit pre-scripted, "staged" behavior only, where character learning is a minor component, if taken into consideration at all. Adventure game characters will never remember us the second time they see us, and characters in a fighting game will seldom adapt to our fighting style through a series of combats. Still, as CPU power increases, and player's expectations sky-rocket, learning is slowly gaining ground in the game AI development community. A solid proof of this was evident at Monday's full day tutorial on game learning techniques at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, where professors John Laird and Michael Van Lent from the University of Michigan surveyed the different machine learning techniques to a room-filling audience. The tutorial was divided into chewable portions which, as a whole, provided a gentle but thorough overview of what machine learning (ML) is all about, the techniques and costs implied, and how games can benefit from it. Both speakers took turns, with frequent stops to allow questions from the audience, thus making a deep, complex subject easier to follow and understand. For the first portion of the talk, both speakers tried to give basic info on what ML is, when should it be used, and when it can or should be faked. ML is an added computational cost which only benefits some scenarios, and so it should only be used where it can positively affect the gameplay, not as a hyped piece of technology. Here's a recipe that appeared several times during the talk, and very well summarizes the pros and cons of learning in AI systems: Positive side of ML: More interesting, believable behavior due to learning Personalized, re-playable experience New types of games (Black and White and The Sims come to mind) Negative side of ML: More difficult to predict behavior, less control for designer May take a long time to evolve May get stuck / be unreliable It was interesting and refreshing to see two major league AI researchers give an unbiased, neutral opinion where ML is not the solution to all problems in the world, but just a new component that should be evaluated and used when needed. For the longer portion of the talk, both Laird and Van Lent focused on explaining classic machine learning techniques, with emphasis on their applicability for video games. Here's a brief overview of what was covered, and the key ideas: The first surveyed technique was classic decision trees, expanded with rule induction as the learning method. In decision trees, knowledge is represented in a tree with each node being a test, and each child node being an outcome of the test. So, by descending from root to leaves we select the exact configuration of the system, and thus the associated behavior. So, a tree may have a root that classifies characters between friendly or hostile. The second-level node may classify according to the type of weapon they are wielding, and the leaves may specify the behavior associated with each configuration (such as ENEMY with RANGED WEAPON implies FLEE behavior). Decision trees have been used in games for well over twenty years. What's interesting about them is that a number of algorithms (namely, the ID3 and the more recent C4.5 algorithm) have been devised to, given the right number of example cases, automatically build the tree by means of an induction paradigm. An example may look something like: = FLEE = ATTACK And by using ID3 on that set a tree would be built, and thus the character would automatically learn the decision criteria, correctly selecting behaviors according to that criteria. ID3 basically works recursively on the set of attributes to be used as classifiers
Check. Usenet/web groups?Contacts? Check. Add a basic wordprocessor and a few niceties