Actually, it's possible to swap two integer variables without a temporary variable. Although, I don't know if I'd recommend it, on account of it's quite confusing looking and only saves you one temp. This compiles fine on gcc:
/* swap-with-no-temp */ int main() {
int the_answer = 5, my_chaos = 42;
I don't get it. Most times, windoze lets you look through workgroups and choose the one you want to browse them *graphically* (double-click). So there's no need to count the "_"'s. I suspect that your plan worked mostly 'cause you changed the workgroup to something other than "WORKGROUP" and a lot of people didn't think to look for workgroups with anything other than the default name.
But if I did want to count the "_"'s, I could: 1) I copy the "_"'s to the clipboard. 2) I open notepad and paste the "_"'s. 3) I count them. (= 10)
(Note: this is also a handy way to distinguish all of 'l10O' which can be hard to tell in some fonts.)
But that was a general windoze solution. If Unix utilities are available, I could run `wc' (WordCount) with no input, then paste the "_"'s in, then type [ENTER], CTRL+D and word count would tell me how many chars are there.
Yes, I know I'm being geeky an petty, but this is slashdot and I feel I should be allowed.
I have and use KaZaA, but it's not perfect because you're not always sure you're getting what you wanted. A decent service would take care of that concern. The other problem is it can be hard to find the hard-to-find songs. A decent service would take care of that by having near-total selection and a god-like search engine.
At least that's the theory. I think the only way something like this could get going is if it were like Napster, but with a tiny fee and some sort of sophisticated integrated ratings system/search engine like Google uses.
When did we start thinking about the future so much?... maybe the industrial revolution spurred this new way of thinking... I'll bet some historian will tell me I'm totally wrong.
I'm not a historian, but I've seen one on TV. James Burke talks about this somewhere in his ten part series "The Day The Universe Changed". I can't remember in which episode, for sure, unfortuneately. Specifically, he talks about the creation of the idea of progress. I think he pegged it down to the 19th century.
Anyway. It's an astute question--it's definitely the case that humans weren't always so forward-looking, especially in the Middle Ages, as sbaker says. After all, what would they have had to look forward to?
No new cars to be released, no game patchs, no new baby foods, no diapers, no new bands, no over-priced kids toys, no new celebrities, no genetically engineered fruit.
Just the eternal cycle of changing seasons and human thought...
"Alacrity" is a cool word. I remember it being used in a 50 year old book about Chess. The author was explaining how, as a beginner Chess player, you wanted to probably play 1.e4 and then just leave it there for a while. You wouldn't want to keep moving the pawn around.
But it goes on to say this is not set in stone: "Of course if Black moves its Queen to d5, the pawn will capture her with alacrity!"
The problem is that stupid push-down mechanism they made. I imagine if you took the top of the case off so you could position the cartridge in the connector better, almost all of your problems would go away.
The way the standard Nintendo was designed it's very difficult to ensure that the metal fingers/pins are actually making good contact with the connector inside the Nintendo. First you put the cartridge in at a funny angle, then you push it down. By the time all that's happened, you may not have a good connection anymore.
It's worth noting that every other cartridge system I've ever seen uses the simpler push-the-cartridge-straight-down design. And they have much fewer problems with lack of contact.
no person is compelled to read their coins. Why is it when it comes to every form of "offensive" speech other than religion, the common view is if you don't like it, don't read it. But when it comes to religion, it must be eliminated in all forms at all costs?
I find almost all of what Andrew Dice Clay says offensive. Occasionally, he's tolerable on standard network TV. (The fun part there is just watching him try to get through 10 min of air time without saying something he's not alloud to say.) Since I find his speech offensive, I don't go to his shows, and never rent his videos, etc.
I also find "In God We Trust" being stamped all over our currency offensive. The difference between Andrew Dice Clay and our currency is that I can avoid Mr. Clay, but I have to use currency everyday. True I don't have to read it, but that's not the point. Just having it be there, written right on the face of the money, in a nation which supposedly has a basic rule about separation of church and state is offensive. IMHO, the currency should be impartial.
How do we know this is even a real internal memo? I mean, this is comming froma site *named* internalmemos.com. Come on! There's a submission form. I could just send any old thing in if I wanted. The only difficult part is making it look convincing. That only takes a few hours of effort.
Anyone that has an axe to grind with Sun could have sent this in. That could be some big company or (far more realistic) some random slob that just wants to be mean.
Or it could be real. But who cares? As the Score 5 AC pointed out, this is about bugs in the JRE on Solrais, not necessarily about Java in general.
So what was so great about Clarke? goombah99 says Clarke made "blunt staements on the to the need to avoid erosion of privacy rights" and that's all fine and good, I suppose.
However, everyone here seems entirely unaware that Clarke is the same dumbass that tried to warn everyone of the prospect of a digital Perl Harbor. In this keynote adddress, Clarke exploits the 9/11 tragedy to stir up peoples' fears by saying that the U.S. is vulnerable to the "functional [electronic or Internet based] equivalent of four 767s crashing into buildings, not the little car bomb." To me, he just seems like a big time fearmonger.
Apparently, the only kind of statement Clarke knows how to make is the blunt kind. I'm not surprised he's leaving.
Gibson is an uneducated, non technical, hype obsessed idiot. Check out grcsucks.com for more.
As much as I hate being in the position of having to defend Steve Gibson, here I am. From the URL you referred to, we get this:
We value your help and like it when you refer other poeple to this site,
but please do not link to this site and brand Mr. Gibson as a scam, he is not (per se).
(emphsis mine)
I've been all over grc.com. I've read some of the stuff that's there, and I've used some of the programs. Based on all of that, here is my opinion of Steve Gibson:
He is a good programmer, by which I mean to say, he can produce programs that look good and actually work as advertised. That's cool.
He has a strange obession with coding things in all-assembly. He points out that the benifit is that the program takes "not one byte more than necessary." He glosses over the fact that this chains his programs into the Win32 world very strongly.
He has an ego problem. Also, he seems to think that it's his right and obligation to try and help people by telling them how the Internet is an unsafe place and raw sockets are totally evil and dangerous.
I'm not sure if that was clear or not. What I'm trying to say: I think Steve Gibson has contributed a few quite useful programs and services to the web. (I've used his remote port scanner thing many times.) However, it seems he's got the all-to-frequent paranoia problems and maybe a messiah complex. Oh well. As long as you don't actually believe anything on grc.com, it's all good.:-)
I believe this page does a good job of explaining the workings of Steve Gibson. (But then, I've never met the man, so I could be totally wrong.)
(moderator note: no, this comment isn't redundant--the article posted was that bad.)
Before everyone goes out to destroy the evil, ugly, insidious worms skulking in cyberspace waiting for the time when the stars are right to destroy us all, please go here.
I grant you that there seem to always be people that complain, no matter what. However, sometimes when people complain, there is a legitimate reason. Sometimes complaints indicate that people would like things to change.
But let's get realistic for a 'sec--we both know, based on what you've said, that you don't really give a sh*t and neither do any of the other slashdot editors. That's okay, I quite understand. I don't really care much either (obviously) or else I wouldn't keep coming to slashdot.
And, really, how much should I expect from slashdot? How much did I pay slashdot for the service they provide? Nothing. So what sort of quality should I expect? None apparently.
And I'm rarely disappointed. So please, keep up the sloppy grammar, sloppy editing, sloppy posting and all the rest. Thank you timothy-of-Slashdot! Truly and amateur and unprofessional person correctly representing the geeks-in-the-basement attitude that has always been Slashdot's hallmark. Please, keep up the bad work! I'm just glad I'm not paying for the slashdot "service".
I apologize for getting a little flame-y here, I'm just trying to make my point. Please understand: slashdot has provided me with much humor, much weird technology things, and occasionally something useful. For all those things: I thank you.
But the highly unprofessional attitude continually demostrated by the slashdot editors ensures that I never forget that I can't actually *trust* anything I read on slashdot and I *certainly* can't consider it a true News site. Perhaps the gripes you keep reading are an indication that the users would *like* for slashdot to be more professional. (ya think? maybe, just maybe?) I hate the fact that whenever I send a link from a slashdot story to a friend of mine, I have to preface it by saying, "Warning: this is from slashdot, so you can't trust it..."
As cgenman has already said (elsewhere in this thread level), this is ludicrously impossible. But even supposing that it were possible, I fail to see how the computer could really *avoid* defeat this way. Oh sure, in this strange, bizzaro scenario, the computer avoids being checkmated--but now people are going to dismantle it to find out "what went wrong". (classic melodramatic thing to do with a rouge computer that's killing people)
But then, what usually happens next is, the now self-aware computer builds itself a body (out of chess pieces I guess?), then starts knockin' down the humans like they're rag dolls. South Park had an episode sort of like this called "Trapper Keeper 2000" or something.
I'm sorry, I intended to refute the story properly, but it's just too silly. It sounds too much like the beginning of a (bad) sci-fi movie.
In any case, the checksum only really protects against things getting screwed up through the transfer - if they are screwed up to begin with, the checksum isn't going to help at all.
But there are ways... In KaZaA land (Yeah, yeah--spyware, but that's what KaZaA Lite is for) they're trying to get "verified files" going. The idea: you go to a web page or something, that you trust. You click a special link there and instead of starting some normal download, it pastes a special unique identifier (like an md5 sum--maybe it actually is an md5 sum, I don't know) into your KaZaA search thingie.
The problem: If any host that has a copy of the file makes any changes at all, it may not have the same id anymore. Also, you have to actually have a lot of users participating (not screwing each other over) and updating and mantaining all these sites and things. It takes more effort, therefore it won't work out as well.
Alright, first: I don't even own an XBox, I don't know if I ever will.
So why should people bother? Is it a waste of their time to spend so much effort tinkering on XBox when MS clearly does not want them to?
Of course it isn't. Firstly, no one should ever discourage a geek from playing (attempting to hack or modify hardware or software). It's the single most important aspect of it all: the thrill of seeing what you can do with what you've got. Can I tweak it so it goes a little faster? Can I tweak so it sounds a little clearer? Can I take this fridge and make it act as a firewall?:-D That's the whole damn point: to play. to try to augment and modify hardware and software simply to see if it can be done.
GEEK-SPOK: Why have you been staring at the internals of that mountain of database code for the past two days? That's not our deptartment. GEEK-KIRK: [dopey voice] Because it's there.
Of course, that's not the *only* reason to hack. Another is: We Hate Microsoft. And why wouldn't we? They try to lock us out of the software, and their not satisfied with that, now they want to lock us out of the hardware as well. *Naturally* hackers will try to hack it.
And what's so bad about that? I think some of the naysayers hear lack imagination. Think of XBox hacking as a big, community-based R&D project--because it is. Just like all R&D projects, we're not exactly sure what will come out of it. But I, for one, am curious to find out.
Although getting Linux up and running on XBox is still a bit tricksy today, that doesn't necessarily mean it will be difficult tomorrow. This latest innovation means that more hackers will be able to play.
It's conceivable that, at some future point, Linux-on-XBox may be as easy as inserting a CD (after having purchased the appropriate *type* of XBox from the store). Once the hardware is openned up, anything is possible. Myself, I'm looking forward to the prosepct of a "MAME distribution" for "Linux On XBox". Of course, you'd have to download all the romsets from somewhere else.;-)
I know people have managed to get MAME up and running on XBox already, but that's what I'm getting at--as I understand it, it's still a bit involved right now. But as all this XBox hacking moves forward, it may one day be simple enough for everybody--or at least simple enough for the average geek.
Most important reason to hack the XBox: if the xboxhackers don't hack it to figure out how it works and let the masses know, who will?
P.S. I obviously wrote this strange, long post all at once w/o any proofing or anything. If the ideas or grammar offend anyone, all I can say is: oops, my bad.
Wow. Since I made my original post, I've been modded down once and had various disagreements posted below. Many of those people may not have read all the way down to the bottom where I said:
I'll be fair and admit that this position I've listed above is very, very old. It may be outdated now. Or maybe it isn't. I don't know.
That means that, what I was doing was simply posting a piece of "established wisdom". It is my policy to always take anything that's "established wisdom" with a grain of salt. I was simply posting the standard arguement. I was not trying to troll, and I was not trying to start a flame ware. It's just, this person said a certain thing and there's this well-established standard argument against it. So I posted it. I made sure to mention that I wasn't sure if I agreed with it or not.
The ironic thing is, I feel that, to some extent, all the posters saying Pascal's OK, have convinced me that it isn't OK.
Everyone saying that Standard Pascal sucked but that Delphi Pascal is great or Object Pascal is great should focus attention here:
People who use Pascal for serious programming fall into a fatal trap. Because the language is impotent, it must be extended. But each group extends Pascal in its own direction, to make it look like whatever language they really want. Extensions for separate compilation, FORTRAN-like COMMON, string data types, internal static variables, initialization, octal numbers, bit operators, etc., all add to the utility of the language for one group but destroy its portability to others.
And there it is. The only thing that makes it okay is if the extended Pascals are standard enough now. If they're wide-spread enough. Are they? I guess from the arguments and flame-like posts, perhaps they are. I don't know. But is there anything that Pascal can do that other languages can't?
The reason why you don't see more Pascal development, at least in Unix world is probably this:
Pascal n.
An Algol-descended language designed by
Niklaus Wirth on the CDC 6600 around 1967-68 as an instructional
tool for elementary programming. This language, designed primarily
to keep students from shooting themselves in the foot and thus
extremely restrictive from a general-purpose-programming point of
view, was later promoted as a general-purpose tool and, in fact,
became the ancestor of a large family of languages including
Modula-2 and Ada (see also bondage-and-discipline language). The hackish point of view on Pascal was probably best
summed up by a devastating (and, in its deadpan way, screamingly
funny) 1981 paper by Brian Kernighan (of K&R fame) entitled
"Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language", which
was turned down by the technical journals but circulated widely via
photocopies. It was eventually published in "Comparing and
Assessing Programming Languages", edited by Alan Feuer and Narain
Gehani (Prentice-Hall, 1984). Part of his discussion is worth
repeating here, because its criticisms are still apposite to Pascal
itself after many years of improvement and could also stand as an
indictment of many other bondage-and-discipline languages. (The
entire essay is available at
http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html.) At the end
of a summary of the case against Pascal, Kernighan wrote:
9. There is no escape
This last point is perhaps the most important. The language is
inadequate but circumscribed, because there is no way to escape its
limitations. There are no casts to disable the type-checking when
necessary. There is no way to replace the defective run-time
environment with a sensible one, unless one controls the compiler
that defines the "standard procedures". The language is
closed.
People who use Pascal for serious programming fall into a fatal
trap. Because the language is impotent, it must be extended. But
each group extends Pascal in its own direction, to make it look
like whatever language they really want. Extensions for separate
compilation, FORTRAN-like COMMON, string data types, internal
static variables, initialization, octal numbers, bit operators,
etc., all add to the utility of the language for one group but
destroy its portability to others.
I feel that it is a mistake to use Pascal for anything much beyond
its original target. In its pure form, Pascal is a toy language,
suitable for teaching but not for real programming.
Pascal has since been entirely displaced (mainly by C) from the
niches it had acquired in serious applications and systems
programming, and from its role as a teaching language by Java.
(reference) Now, since you were honest enough to admit you like Pascal, I'll be fair and admit that this position I've listed above is very, very old. It may be outdated now. Or maybe it isn't. I don't know.
I know it means I'm kinda pathetic, but I really like Alan Alda's (yes, the actor).
From the "Deeper" section:
What your science advisor really needs to do is help you re-fashion the thinking of the country. Too many people think cloning cells for the fight against disease is the same thing as creating Frankenstein's monster. Too many people think evolution is the idea that people are descended from apes. And too many people think that genetic modification of plants is a dangerous new idea, instead of something that's been going on for ten thousand years.
...
The problem is that, although we're all entitled to our beliefs, our culture increasingly holds that science is just another belief. Maybe this is because it's easier to believe something--anything--than not to know.
We don't like uncertainty--so we gravitate back to the last comfortable solution we had, and in this way we elevate belief to the status of fact.
But scientists are comfortable with not knowing. They thrive on it. They don't assume that just because they had an idea it must be right. They attack it as vigorously as they can because they don't want to lie to themselves. As Richard Feynman said, "Not knowing is much more interesting than believing an answer which might be wrong."
I only hope that Alan is wrong about the Death of Reason In The U.S. I hope, but not much. See, on the one hand, people are always saying, "oh, man things are so screwed up." I'm not just talking about the last few years or even the last few centuries. You go back to biblical times and before and there were still people saying how bad it all was. It's a constant throughout the ages.
So there's hope that Alan's wrong and the seeming surge of gulibility (phone psychics, John Edwards, et al.) are just a fad or trend. Or on the other hand, it could be that the U.S's torch is fading. Goodbye reason, hello psychics, how did we ever get along without you! Yes, I understand that it's okay that we murder all those nasty Arab-types 'cause Johnny Edwards says the dead ones are thanking us from Hell...
Okay, I apologize for going a bit freaky there, folks. Obviously, it's late and past my bedtime. Goodnite, don't let the ziparumpazoos bite.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't get it. Most times, windoze lets you look through workgroups and choose the one you want to browse them *graphically* (double-click). So there's no need to count the "_"'s. I suspect that your plan worked mostly 'cause you changed the workgroup to something other than "WORKGROUP" and a lot of people didn't think to look for workgroups with anything other than the default name.
But if I did want to count the "_"'s, I could:
1) I copy the "_"'s to the clipboard.
2) I open notepad and paste the "_"'s.
3) I count them. (= 10)
(Note: this is also a handy way to distinguish all of 'l10O' which can be hard to tell in some fonts.)
But that was a general windoze solution. If Unix utilities are available, I could run `wc' (WordCount) with no input, then paste the "_"'s in, then type [ENTER], CTRL+D and word count would tell me how many chars are there.
Yes, I know I'm being geeky an petty, but this is slashdot and I feel I should be allowed.
I have and use KaZaA, but it's not perfect because you're not always sure you're getting what you wanted. A decent service would take care of that concern. The other problem is it can be hard to find the hard-to-find songs. A decent service would take care of that by having near-total selection and a god-like search engine.
At least that's the theory. I think the only way something like this could get going is if it were like Napster, but with a tiny fee and some sort of sophisticated integrated ratings system/search engine like Google uses.
Yeah. Even the definition sounds neat. Although outside of Chess, the idea of soldiers advancing with alacrity is kinda unnerving...
I'm not a historian, but I've seen one on TV. James Burke talks about this somewhere in his ten part series "The Day The Universe Changed". I can't remember in which episode, for sure, unfortuneately. Specifically, he talks about the creation of the idea of progress. I think he pegged it down to the 19th century.
Anyway. It's an astute question--it's definitely the case that humans weren't always so forward-looking, especially in the Middle Ages, as sbaker says. After all, what would they have had to look forward to?
No new cars to be released, no game patchs, no new baby foods, no diapers, no new bands, no over-priced kids toys, no new celebrities, no genetically engineered fruit.
Just the eternal cycle of changing seasons and human thought...
"Alacrity" is a cool word. I remember it being used in a 50 year old book about Chess. The author was explaining how, as a beginner Chess player, you wanted to probably play 1.e4 and then just leave it there for a while. You wouldn't want to keep moving the pawn around.
But it goes on to say this is not set in stone: "Of course if Black moves its Queen to d5, the pawn will capture her with alacrity!"
fnord
I think whichever record industry(ies) we're talking about here just did a simple AD&D calculation:
1d10 * 10 million dollars.
They rolled a `6' so they tell the world: $60 million!
It's a game. It's just like Parker Brother's classic Monopoly, except it's made specially for slashdot editors "tat kant spel no thn rite".
:-)
Hey brainiacs, would it *kill* you to add in an AUTOMATIC spell checker? sheesh
The problem is that stupid push-down mechanism they made. I imagine if you took the top of the case off so you could position the cartridge in the connector better, almost all of your problems would go away.
The way the standard Nintendo was designed it's very difficult to ensure that the metal fingers/pins are actually making good contact with the connector inside the Nintendo. First you put the cartridge in at a funny angle, then you push it down. By the time all that's happened, you may not have a good connection anymore.
It's worth noting that every other cartridge system I've ever seen uses the simpler push-the-cartridge-straight-down design. And they have much fewer problems with lack of contact.
I find almost all of what Andrew Dice Clay says offensive. Occasionally, he's tolerable on standard network TV. (The fun part there is just watching him try to get through 10 min of air time without saying something he's not alloud to say.) Since I find his speech offensive, I don't go to his shows, and never rent his videos, etc.
I also find "In God We Trust" being stamped all over our currency offensive. The difference between Andrew Dice Clay and our currency is that I can avoid Mr. Clay, but I have to use currency everyday. True I don't have to read it, but that's not the point. Just having it be there, written right on the face of the money, in a nation which supposedly has a basic rule about separation of church and state is offensive. IMHO, the currency should be impartial.
How do we know this is even a real internal memo? I mean, this is comming froma site *named* internalmemos.com. Come on! There's a submission form. I could just send any old thing in if I wanted. The only difficult part is making it look convincing. That only takes a few hours of effort.
Anyone that has an axe to grind with Sun could have sent this in. That could be some big company or (far more realistic) some random slob that just wants to be mean.
Or it could be real. But who cares? As the Score 5 AC pointed out, this is about bugs in the JRE on Solrais, not necessarily about Java in general.
Does anyone on slashdot remember what FUD is?
What have Taylor series got to do with it? Oh, wait... I bet you meant tailor . ;-P
Actually, it shows that he has at least half a brain.
He may or may not have more than that.
So what was so great about Clarke? goombah99 says Clarke made "blunt staements on the to the need to avoid erosion of privacy rights" and that's all fine and good, I suppose.
However, everyone here seems entirely unaware that Clarke is the same dumbass that tried to warn everyone of the prospect of a digital Perl Harbor. In this keynote adddress, Clarke exploits the 9/11 tragedy to stir up peoples' fears by saying that the U.S. is vulnerable to the "functional [electronic or Internet based] equivalent of four 767s crashing into buildings, not the little car bomb." To me, he just seems like a big time fearmonger.
Apparently, the only kind of statement Clarke knows how to make is the blunt kind. I'm not surprised he's leaving.
As much as I hate being in the position of having to defend Steve Gibson, here I am. From the URL you referred to, we get this:
(emphsis mine)I've been all over grc.com. I've read some of the stuff that's there, and I've used some of the programs. Based on all of that, here is my opinion of Steve Gibson:
He is a good programmer, by which I mean to say, he can produce programs that look good and actually work as advertised. That's cool.
He has a strange obession with coding things in all-assembly. He points out that the benifit is that the program takes "not one byte more than necessary." He glosses over the fact that this chains his programs into the Win32 world very strongly.
He has an ego problem. Also, he seems to think that it's his right and obligation to try and help people by telling them how the Internet is an unsafe place and raw sockets are totally evil and dangerous.
I'm not sure if that was clear or not. What I'm trying to say: I think Steve Gibson has contributed a few quite useful programs and services to the web. (I've used his remote port scanner thing many times.) However, it seems he's got the all-to-frequent paranoia problems and maybe a messiah complex. Oh well. As long as you don't actually believe anything on grc.com, it's all good. :-)
I believe this page does a good job of explaining the workings of Steve Gibson. (But then, I've never met the man, so I could be totally wrong.)
(moderator note: no, this comment isn't redundant--the article posted was that bad.)
Before everyone goes out to destroy the evil, ugly, insidious worms skulking in cyberspace waiting for the time when the stars are right to destroy us all, please go here.
I grant you that there seem to always be people that complain, no matter what. However, sometimes when people complain, there is a legitimate reason. Sometimes complaints indicate that people would like things to change.
But let's get realistic for a 'sec--we both know, based on what you've said, that you don't really give a sh*t and neither do any of the other slashdot editors. That's okay, I quite understand. I don't really care much either (obviously) or else I wouldn't keep coming to slashdot.
And, really, how much should I expect from slashdot? How much did I pay slashdot for the service they provide? Nothing. So what sort of quality should I expect? None apparently.
And I'm rarely disappointed. So please, keep up the sloppy grammar, sloppy editing, sloppy posting and all the rest. Thank you timothy-of-Slashdot! Truly and amateur and unprofessional person correctly representing the geeks-in-the-basement attitude that has always been Slashdot's hallmark. Please, keep up the bad work! I'm just glad I'm not paying for the slashdot "service".
I apologize for getting a little flame-y here, I'm just trying to make my point. Please understand: slashdot has provided me with much humor, much weird technology things, and occasionally something useful. For all those things: I thank you.
But the highly unprofessional attitude continually demostrated by the slashdot editors ensures that I never forget that I can't actually *trust* anything I read on slashdot and I *certainly* can't consider it a true News site. Perhaps the gripes you keep reading are an indication that the users would *like* for slashdot to be more professional. (ya think? maybe, just maybe?) I hate the fact that whenever I send a link from a slashdot story to a friend of mine, I have to preface it by saying, "Warning: this is from slashdot, so you can't trust it..."
Interesting!=Informative!=Insightful && Interesting!=Insightful
The `!=' is not transitive.
As cgenman has already said (elsewhere in this thread level), this is ludicrously impossible. But even supposing that it were possible, I fail to see how the computer could really *avoid* defeat this way. Oh sure, in this strange, bizzaro scenario, the computer avoids being checkmated--but now people are going to dismantle it to find out "what went wrong". (classic melodramatic thing to do with a rouge computer that's killing people)
But then, what usually happens next is, the now self-aware computer builds itself a body (out of chess pieces I guess?), then starts knockin' down the humans like they're rag dolls. South Park had an episode sort of like this called "Trapper Keeper 2000" or something.
I'm sorry, I intended to refute the story properly, but it's just too silly. It sounds too much like the beginning of a (bad) sci-fi movie.
But there are ways... In KaZaA land (Yeah, yeah--spyware, but that's what KaZaA Lite is for) they're trying to get "verified files" going. The idea: you go to a web page or something, that you trust. You click a special link there and instead of starting some normal download, it pastes a special unique identifier (like an md5 sum--maybe it actually is an md5 sum, I don't know) into your KaZaA search thingie.
The problem: If any host that has a copy of the file makes any changes at all, it may not have the same id anymore. Also, you have to actually have a lot of users participating (not screwing each other over) and updating and mantaining all these sites and things. It takes more effort, therefore it won't work out as well.
Alright, first: I don't even own an XBox, I don't know if I ever will.
:-D That's the whole damn point: to play. to try to augment and modify hardware and software simply to see if it can be done.
;-)
So why should people bother? Is it a waste of their time to spend so much effort tinkering on XBox when MS clearly does not want them to?
Of course it isn't. Firstly, no one should ever discourage a geek from playing (attempting to hack or modify hardware or software). It's the single most important aspect of it all: the thrill of seeing what you can do with what you've got. Can I tweak it so it goes a little faster? Can I tweak so it sounds a little clearer? Can I take this fridge and make it act as a firewall?
GEEK-SPOK: Why have you been staring at the internals of that mountain of database code for the past two days? That's not our deptartment.
GEEK-KIRK: [dopey voice] Because it's there.
Of course, that's not the *only* reason to hack. Another is: We Hate Microsoft. And why wouldn't we? They try to lock us out of the software, and their not satisfied with that, now they want to lock us out of the hardware as well. *Naturally* hackers will try to hack it.
And what's so bad about that? I think some of the naysayers hear lack imagination. Think of XBox hacking as a big, community-based R&D project--because it is. Just like all R&D projects, we're not exactly sure what will come out of it. But I, for one, am curious to find out.
Although getting Linux up and running on XBox is still a bit tricksy today, that doesn't necessarily mean it will be difficult tomorrow. This latest innovation means that more hackers will be able to play.
It's conceivable that, at some future point, Linux-on-XBox may be as easy as inserting a CD (after having purchased the appropriate *type* of XBox from the store). Once the hardware is openned up, anything is possible. Myself, I'm looking forward to the prosepct of a "MAME distribution" for "Linux On XBox". Of course, you'd have to download all the romsets from somewhere else.
I know people have managed to get MAME up and running on XBox already, but that's what I'm getting at--as I understand it, it's still a bit involved right now. But as all this XBox hacking moves forward, it may one day be simple enough for everybody--or at least simple enough for the average geek.
Most important reason to hack the XBox: if the xboxhackers don't hack it to figure out how it works and let the masses know, who will?
P.S. I obviously wrote this strange, long post all at once w/o any proofing or anything. If the ideas or grammar offend anyone, all I can say is: oops, my bad.
Wow. Since I made my original post, I've been modded down once and had various disagreements posted below. Many of those people may not have read all the way down to the bottom where I said:
That means that, what I was doing was simply posting a piece of "established wisdom". It is my policy to always take anything that's "established wisdom" with a grain of salt. I was simply posting the standard arguement. I was not trying to troll, and I was not trying to start a flame ware. It's just, this person said a certain thing and there's this well-established standard argument against it. So I posted it. I made sure to mention that I wasn't sure if I agreed with it or not.The ironic thing is, I feel that, to some extent, all the posters saying Pascal's OK, have convinced me that it isn't OK.
Everyone saying that Standard Pascal sucked but that Delphi Pascal is great or Object Pascal is great should focus attention here:
And there it is. The only thing that makes it okay is if the extended Pascals are standard enough now. If they're wide-spread enough. Are they? I guess from the arguments and flame-like posts, perhaps they are. I don't know. But is there anything that Pascal can do that other languages can't?(reference) Now, since you were honest enough to admit you like Pascal, I'll be fair and admit that this position I've listed above is very, very old. It may be outdated now. Or maybe it isn't. I don't know.
I know it means I'm kinda pathetic, but I really like Alan Alda's (yes, the actor).
From the "Deeper" section:
I only hope that Alan is wrong about the Death of Reason In The U.S. I hope, but not much. See, on the one hand, people are always saying, "oh, man things are so screwed up." I'm not just talking about the last few years or even the last few centuries. You go back to biblical times and before and there were still people saying how bad it all was. It's a constant throughout the ages.
So there's hope that Alan's wrong and the seeming surge of gulibility (phone psychics, John Edwards, et al.) are just a fad or trend. Or on the other hand, it could be that the U.S's torch is fading. Goodbye reason, hello psychics, how did we ever get along without you! Yes, I understand that it's okay that we murder all those nasty Arab-types 'cause Johnny Edwards says the dead ones are thanking us from Hell...
Okay, I apologize for going a bit freaky there, folks. Obviously, it's late and past my bedtime. Goodnite, don't let the ziparumpazoos bite.