What are you talking about? I'm sure I will have next October 26 off to celebrate Overclocked Radeon Broke 1GHz Barrier Day. Heck, this may even become Overclocked GPU Awareness Week.
I'll be the first one to ask my company to give everybody a day off to celebrate such a day. I'll celebrate anything, really, as long as I get my day off.
Most of Uncyclopedia's stuff is like 'The country of Nigeria is famous for its 70s glam rock music. It was recently visited by George Bush, the Queen of Sweden.
Oh, come on, look at the Nigeria article... It's nothing like what you describe. Here's a good quote from that page:
...Nigeria has an extensive technology sector. The biggest business sector in Nigeria is online financial re-allocation. Many wealthy countries such as Britain often have large sums of unclaimed money. Nigerians are typically employed to re-allocate millions of dollars to lucky Americans via email for a 100,000$ bank fee....
More resource for the society as a whole does not require more resources for each individual, as the population of the society increases.
As the parent pointed out, the population went up *because* the farming provided better conditions for the individuals. They didn't just start making more babies because they were farming and then had trouble feeding all that extra population. The population was growing because everybody had more food, and could therefore survive longer to make more babies that will again have enough to eat to survive, and so on...
How the hell is a powerful video card going to help decoding H.264? It's the CPU that's struggling.
New video cards have H.264 hardware decoding built in. Within a year or so, even new integrated graphics will have H.264 hardware decoding, since everybody is going nuts over it.
But if you want denoise filters, unsharp masks, deinterlacing, etc. you're going to need some power. But last time I checked there was no GPU acceleration for any of those filters, the burden was on the CPU. Maybe that's changed since I last looked in to it.
All of those things are now done using pixel shaders on the GPU, if available.
In the year of 1997 305,000 DVD players were sold.
Ok, now that's not a fair comparison either. I'm sure that there were only 10,000 or less TVs sold the first year they came out, but we can't possibly compare that number to the number of PS2s sold at launch. When DVD players came out, they were a brand new technology, while PS2 was just a new revision of an old tech -- gaming console.
The people who bought PS2 are the same part of the demographic that will buy PS3, as well -- early adopters of new consoles. I think it's fair to assume that that number is approximately the same, with maybe an upside of 10-20% accounting for increased marketing efforts and population growth.
On the other hand, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD players will not be a new technology like DVD was when it came out. It's just a new "feature" on high-end DVD players (at first), and then a feature on all of them. I don't know how long it will take the manufacturers to reduce the cost of the HD support, but you'll most likely have HD-DVD or Blu-Ray on every DVD player out there within a couple of years.
They are going to have a HUGE user base for BluRay after the launch the PS3
Last year, 37 million DVD players were sold in North America, compared to 4.3 million PS2 consoles. Even with a slightly inflated number for the year of PS3 launch, the proportion of real DVD players over PS3 will be quite large. If most of these players are HD-DVD, Blu-Ray will be far from having a huge user base.
This is just the first link I found... There are lots of DDR pads out there for home use, some of them really fancy and completely on par with the arcade ones (although they will cost a bundle).
Similarly, you can find rather involved home driving interfaces if you are into driving... Really, most of the out-of-the-ordinary arcade interfaces are available for home use, as well.
It isn't valid to compare it to an iPod since an iPod Nano plays all your old music. It remains to be seen what backwards compatibility the XBox 360 has. So why take the risk? You say MS & Sony would correct major flaws, but if the XBox 360 turns out to not play half your XBox games, or the core version doesn't play them at all.
But, I'm not buying Xbox 360 to play my old Xbox games. I already have the original Xbox for that! The fact that it will play some of them is simply a matter of convenience -- I might be able to remove the old xbox from my living room, or I might not. It will not make or break the console.
Or XBox Live goes DOA under the strain. Or none of the games support HD TV.
Those are the types of things I find very unlikely to happen, and will take my chances with. Regular Xbox games already support HD, Live has been doing very well under the current strain... It's possible, but not likely.
So why take the risk?
So, I think my original argument still stands. If I wait six months, that's six months that I will not enjoy this entertainment device that will most likely work better than the current one. If I'm sure that I will get it six months from now if no catastrophic failures occur, and I find those unlikely, then I might as well get it now.
It's not at all the mentality of being first (for most of the people, anyway), it's the mentality of new entertainment technology that most likely better than the old one, and will probably be more fun. I bought a Nano a couple of days ago not to be "first", but because it's much better than what I had before, and from the specs appears to be what I need.
Sure, there's a risk that there will be problems and flaws, but both Microsoft and Apple are fairly large companies that will most likely correct any major flaws in some way that will satisfy consumers, and we will all find ways around the smaller flaws, like we always do with any other technology.
I could wait 4-5 months, but then I'd have a crappy 64MB MP3 player for another 5 months. Odds are in my favour that I will be happy with the purchase.
Essentially the HD format war was won at E3 when Sony announced that Blu-ray drive in the PS3. MS is pissed about it, they didn't think Sony would be able to pull it off.
What's there to "pull off"? You either decide to put a HD-DVD drive in it, or a DVD drive. It's purely a marketing/business decision -- how much will the drive cost, how much can we charge for the console, how much loss are we willing to take on the hardware, and then make the decision. It's not like Sony's engineers came up with a miracle new technology, they simply decided to spend the extra bucks and put the next generation optical drive in. I don't think MS was too surprised to see PS3 feature a blu-ray drive, not too gamers were.
Time will tell who made the right decision. You have a good point with the "dual toy" point of view, but if PS3 turns out to cost $100 more when it comes out (because Xbox 360 will be discounted by then), then that's going to eat into the sales, as well.
I'd have it roaming the small-fry tables with casual players, and clean up on the margins. Even if it only makes a few percent profit by playing conservatively, if I run it 24hrs a day it'll soon add up, at the direct expense of the 'average' players.
You'd have to run it at something similar to a human playing pattern instead of 24hr a day, otherwise it will be very easily detected by the site operators. So, it might add up after a while, but it might not add up to too much.
It all depends on how much of a positive EV you can make your bot play at. In on-line low-limit games, the action is so wild that it would be hard for the bot to make any kind of a read on a player. So, if it always folds to a raise unless it has the nuts, it will rarely see the river. If it only draws to the nuts, it will rarely hit anything. Making it do anything in between that is quite an undertaking of "teaching" the bot to play poker instead of simply do math and recognizing top hands, and then you could start losing a lot of money on bad reads of the crazy action.
This "statistically correct play" you people on yammering about doesn't really exist outside the fantasies of game theorists modelling two-player game.
I agree, and that's why I put it in quotes.
But, I think that a very tight-aggresive system that only chases when the pot odds are correct (and assumes that if it hits, it will win), and always bets top pair or better, and always folds to raises unless it has the nuts or draws to the nuts, will have a positive EV against a group of average low-limit online players. With a randomization where it changes its behaviour on 5% of all actions, I think it will take a while for a table of beginners to start exploiting such strategy.
still don't understand why online poker is so damn popular - any game where the odds can be calculated with any degree of accuracy is ideal fodder for bots, which can patiently calculate hands until the heat death of the universe.
That's such a minor thing in poker that it really doesn't make a difference. A good player can estimate the odds and probabilities in a few seconds close enough to matter for most hands, and within a minute or so in others. It's actually putting a percentage next to possible hands for the opponent that the bot can't do well at all, and will therefor always lose to a good human player. In no-limit games against good players that's much more true than in limit games against a mediocre crowd, mind you, since big blunders will cost the bot less, and "statistically correct" plays will win more often than not in a large group of average players.
I'm not so pissed off at dupes, they just tell me that they don't really care, especially after being notified and after all the screaming slashdotters after every dupe. It's kind of a first sign that I should look elsewhere.
But, since the number of bogus stories, advertisements presented as stories, and link summary stories have really gone up recently, I've been looking more and more at other similar sites...
What do you guys recommend as good alternatives? Something with good/relevant or at least funny commentary, something like Penny Arcade but for all things nerdy?
If everyone's been doing it since, doesn't that argue that it's obvious, and hence non-patentable?
It's hard to argue that since Creative did actually release a device with such an interface at that time. Yeah, my personal opinion is that it's obvious, but once Creative made one it's hard to say whether others were copying it or just developing the same thing on their own.
If anything I view this patent as Creatives admission to Apples domination in the mp3 market (slow the big-boy down so we can catch-up).
You have to understand that this patent had to be filed some time in '99 or '00 for it to be awarded now... At that point, there hardly was any kind of an mp3 market to dominate -- that's why things like this patent sounded "inovative" enough for the PTO office to accept them. They can't reject a patent just because everybody has been doing the same thing *since*. If there was no prior art at the time of the submission, it's a valid patent.
There is no such thing. It plays according to the rules that the author made, which he picked up from books like the Sklansky's book mentioned in the article...
Preflop, you can probably play something close to "statistically perfect" poker, in a limit game. But, so can any real-life person, as well, using a simple look-up table.
Post-flop, you need to "put" people on hands in order to calculate your pot odds and figure out the mathematically right play. For that, you need models of opponents... And that's where you can throw statistics out the window against anybody but a most predictable novice player. And even against them, you have to play a very large number of hands in which you see their cards and the end of a hand in order to build good statistical models. Your only option in on-line poker is to pre-assign each opponent a pre-created model, and modify it along the way, hoping you're close enough...
The point you're missing is that several accounts, all playing WinHoldEm bots which are communicating with one another can rape even the best players over time. It's cheating at poker, and the gambling sites can't seem to control it yet.
You don't need WinHoldEm, you just need a IM or a telephone. But, the fact is, having 2 players sitting at the same table, knowing each other's hands is not much of an advantage. The only real advantage is raising-reraising to get another player squeezed in to pay more when one of the colluding players has a good hand. That's very easily detectable and online site are quick to ban those players.
It's also easy to do routine checks on which players tend to play together often, and the ones that always sit on the same table are flagged as suspicious, and their hands can be reviewed manually...
and I certainly don't trust the intentions of any online poker room that refuses to even offer that option.
That's definitely your choice. But, as long as you are a tiny minority of the population, they won't care. And, you'll miss out on the money that can be won by playing against the newbies of the world who donate their money to other players.
If you take a simpler game with similar problems (unknown cards) like Black Jack their are well known counting techniques that even without knowing what the other player has in hand can be used to win at Black Jack.
Poker is just the same, just a bit more complicated.
In Black Jack, the dealer always behaves the same way -- hit on 16, stop on 17, for example. By knowing what you have, and what dealer has, it's relatively simple to calculate odds of you winning if you take another card vs. not.
In poker, the way current AIs work is by assigning a probability of the opponent holding a certain hand to every possible hand, and then using "statistics", as you say, to calculate the expected value of a call, raise, or fold... and the highest is picked (I'm oversimplifying, but that's the essence.). In no-limit, this gets much harder, because there is no simple 'raise', it's raise, and the amount... so, you have to simplify by looking at 'small raise', 'big raise', 'huge raise'... etc.
How the opponent is going to react to any of these is what's really hard to figure out for an AI. Does the opponent consider your huge raise to be huge, or does he think it's only a 'big' raise?
It's also very hard to assign good probabilities to each hand. You can use hang strengths to assign certain probabilities, but that's only if the opponent always play straightforward -- bet when you have a good hand, check when you don't... What do you assign when he calls your bet? A mediocre hand, or a good drawing hand, or a really good hand and he is slowplaying it?
Well, as you can see, because you don't have all the information available, you can't simply calculate the right move.
The bottom line is, there is no right move for every situation. That's why you'll never see poker problems in the newspaper like you do with chess.
Linux strikes me as more the OS of choise for tech types (engineers, IT pros, etc), as its much more robust at those type of applications than Windows.
Even engineers have to use the office tools for non-engineering work. The setup I have at work is a Windows machine with Exceed used to run shell and design apps on Linux servers that host the project files. That way you get the benefits of the Windows desktop for the office tools, and Linux for the design environment.
I do not know what I would do without access to the simple shell scripting tools in Linux (how the hell do I copy every file created on any day after 12PM in windows?).
Slashdot Mirror
What are you talking about? I'm sure I will have next October 26 off to celebrate Overclocked Radeon Broke 1GHz Barrier Day. Heck, this may even become Overclocked GPU Awareness Week.
I'll be the first one to ask my company to give everybody a day off to celebrate such a day. I'll celebrate anything, really, as long as I get my day off.
You two should RTFA. The other part of the prize was building a light cable that was 50% stronger than a 'reference' cable provided by NASA.
Nobody achieved the goal there, either.
Oh, come on, look at the Nigeria article... It's nothing like what you describe. Here's a good quote from that page:
More resource for the society as a whole does not require more resources for each individual, as the population of the society increases.
As the parent pointed out, the population went up *because* the farming provided better conditions for the individuals. They didn't just start making more babies because they were farming and then had trouble feeding all that extra population. The population was growing because everybody had more food, and could therefore survive longer to make more babies that will again have enough to eat to survive, and so on...
How the hell is a powerful video card going to help decoding H.264? It's the CPU that's struggling.
New video cards have H.264 hardware decoding built in. Within a year or so, even new integrated graphics will have H.264 hardware decoding, since everybody is going nuts over it.
But if you want denoise filters, unsharp masks, deinterlacing, etc. you're going to need some power. But last time I checked there was no GPU acceleration for any of those filters, the burden was on the CPU. Maybe that's changed since I last looked in to it.
All of those things are now done using pixel shaders on the GPU, if available.
In the year of 1997 305,000 DVD players were sold.
Ok, now that's not a fair comparison either. I'm sure that there were only 10,000 or less TVs sold the first year they came out, but we can't possibly compare that number to the number of PS2s sold at launch. When DVD players came out, they were a brand new technology, while PS2 was just a new revision of an old tech -- gaming console.
The people who bought PS2 are the same part of the demographic that will buy PS3, as well -- early adopters of new consoles. I think it's fair to assume that that number is approximately the same, with maybe an upside of 10-20% accounting for increased marketing efforts and population growth.
On the other hand, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD players will not be a new technology like DVD was when it came out. It's just a new "feature" on high-end DVD players (at first), and then a feature on all of them. I don't know how long it will take the manufacturers to reduce the cost of the HD support, but you'll most likely have HD-DVD or Blu-Ray on every DVD player out there within a couple of years.
They are going to have a HUGE user base for BluRay after the launch the PS3
Last year, 37 million DVD players were sold in North America, compared to 4.3 million PS2 consoles. Even with a slightly inflated number for the year of PS3 launch, the proportion of real DVD players over PS3 will be quite large. If most of these players are HD-DVD, Blu-Ray will be far from having a huge user base.
Dance Dance Revolution and it's varients.
This is just the first link I found... There are lots of DDR pads out there for home use, some of them really fancy and completely on par with the arcade ones (although they will cost a bundle).
Similarly, you can find rather involved home driving interfaces if you are into driving... Really, most of the out-of-the-ordinary arcade interfaces are available for home use, as well.
It isn't valid to compare it to an iPod since an iPod Nano plays all your old music. It remains to be seen what backwards compatibility the XBox 360 has. So why take the risk? You say MS & Sony would correct major flaws, but if the XBox 360 turns out to not play half your XBox games, or the core version doesn't play them at all.
But, I'm not buying Xbox 360 to play my old Xbox games. I already have the original Xbox for that! The fact that it will play some of them is simply a matter of convenience -- I might be able to remove the old xbox from my living room, or I might not. It will not make or break the console.
Or XBox Live goes DOA under the strain. Or none of the games support HD TV.
Those are the types of things I find very unlikely to happen, and will take my chances with. Regular Xbox games already support HD, Live has been doing very well under the current strain... It's possible, but not likely.
So why take the risk?
So, I think my original argument still stands. If I wait six months, that's six months that I will not enjoy this entertainment device that will most likely work better than the current one. If I'm sure that I will get it six months from now if no catastrophic failures occur, and I find those unlikely, then I might as well get it now.
The mentality of owning something first when...
It's not at all the mentality of being first (for most of the people, anyway), it's the mentality of new entertainment technology that most likely better than the old one, and will probably be more fun. I bought a Nano a couple of days ago not to be "first", but because it's much better than what I had before, and from the specs appears to be what I need.
Sure, there's a risk that there will be problems and flaws, but both Microsoft and Apple are fairly large companies that will most likely correct any major flaws in some way that will satisfy consumers, and we will all find ways around the smaller flaws, like we always do with any other technology.
I could wait 4-5 months, but then I'd have a crappy 64MB MP3 player for another 5 months. Odds are in my favour that I will be happy with the purchase.
Essentially the HD format war was won at E3 when Sony announced that Blu-ray drive in the PS3. MS is pissed about it, they didn't think Sony would be able to pull it off.
What's there to "pull off"? You either decide to put a HD-DVD drive in it, or a DVD drive. It's purely a marketing/business decision -- how much will the drive cost, how much can we charge for the console, how much loss are we willing to take on the hardware, and then make the decision. It's not like Sony's engineers came up with a miracle new technology, they simply decided to spend the extra bucks and put the next generation optical drive in. I don't think MS was too surprised to see PS3 feature a blu-ray drive, not too gamers were.
Time will tell who made the right decision. You have a good point with the "dual toy" point of view, but if PS3 turns out to cost $100 more when it comes out (because Xbox 360 will be discounted by then), then that's going to eat into the sales, as well.
I'd have it roaming the small-fry tables with casual players, and clean up on the margins. Even if it only makes a few percent profit by playing conservatively, if I run it 24hrs a day it'll soon add up, at the direct expense of the 'average' players.
You'd have to run it at something similar to a human playing pattern instead of 24hr a day, otherwise it will be very easily detected by the site operators. So, it might add up after a while, but it might not add up to too much.
It all depends on how much of a positive EV you can make your bot play at. In on-line low-limit games, the action is so wild that it would be hard for the bot to make any kind of a read on a player. So, if it always folds to a raise unless it has the nuts, it will rarely see the river. If it only draws to the nuts, it will rarely hit anything. Making it do anything in between that is quite an undertaking of "teaching" the bot to play poker instead of simply do math and recognizing top hands, and then you could start losing a lot of money on bad reads of the crazy action.
This "statistically correct play" you people on yammering about doesn't really exist outside the fantasies of game theorists modelling two-player game.
I agree, and that's why I put it in quotes.
But, I think that a very tight-aggresive system that only chases when the pot odds are correct (and assumes that if it hits, it will win), and always bets top pair or better, and always folds to raises unless it has the nuts or draws to the nuts, will have a positive EV against a group of average low-limit online players. With a randomization where it changes its behaviour on 5% of all actions, I think it will take a while for a table of beginners to start exploiting such strategy.
still don't understand why online poker is so damn popular - any game where the odds can be calculated with any degree of accuracy is ideal fodder for bots, which can patiently calculate hands until the heat death of the universe.
That's such a minor thing in poker that it really doesn't make a difference. A good player can estimate the odds and probabilities in a few seconds close enough to matter for most hands, and within a minute or so in others. It's actually putting a percentage next to possible hands for the opponent that the bot can't do well at all, and will therefor always lose to a good human player. In no-limit games against good players that's much more true than in limit games against a mediocre crowd, mind you, since big blunders will cost the bot less, and "statistically correct" plays will win more often than not in a large group of average players.
I'm not so pissed off at dupes, they just tell me that they don't really care, especially after being notified and after all the screaming slashdotters after every dupe. It's kind of a first sign that I should look elsewhere.
But, since the number of bogus stories, advertisements presented as stories, and link summary stories have really gone up recently, I've been looking more and more at other similar sites...
What do you guys recommend as good alternatives? Something with good/relevant or at least funny commentary, something like Penny Arcade but for all things nerdy?
If everyone's been doing it since, doesn't that argue that it's obvious, and hence non-patentable?
It's hard to argue that since Creative did actually release a device with such an interface at that time. Yeah, my personal opinion is that it's obvious, but once Creative made one it's hard to say whether others were copying it or just developing the same thing on their own.
If anything I view this patent as Creatives admission to Apples domination in the mp3 market (slow the big-boy down so we can catch-up).
You have to understand that this patent had to be filed some time in '99 or '00 for it to be awarded now... At that point, there hardly was any kind of an mp3 market to dominate -- that's why things like this patent sounded "inovative" enough for the PTO office to accept them. They can't reject a patent just because everybody has been doing the same thing *since*. If there was no prior art at the time of the submission, it's a valid patent.
It just plays perfect poker (statistically.)
There is no such thing. It plays according to the rules that the author made, which he picked up from books like the Sklansky's book mentioned in the article...
Preflop, you can probably play something close to "statistically perfect" poker, in a limit game. But, so can any real-life person, as well, using a simple look-up table.
Post-flop, you need to "put" people on hands in order to calculate your pot odds and figure out the mathematically right play. For that, you need models of opponents... And that's where you can throw statistics out the window against anybody but a most predictable novice player. And even against them, you have to play a very large number of hands in which you see their cards and the end of a hand in order to build good statistical models. Your only option in on-line poker is to pre-assign each opponent a pre-created model, and modify it along the way, hoping you're close enough...
The point you're missing is that several accounts, all playing WinHoldEm bots which are communicating with one another can rape even the best players over time. It's cheating at poker, and the gambling sites can't seem to control it yet.
You don't need WinHoldEm, you just need a IM or a telephone. But, the fact is, having 2 players sitting at the same table, knowing each other's hands is not much of an advantage. The only real advantage is raising-reraising to get another player squeezed in to pay more when one of the colluding players has a good hand. That's very easily detectable and online site are quick to ban those players.
It's also easy to do routine checks on which players tend to play together often, and the ones that always sit on the same table are flagged as suspicious, and their hands can be reviewed manually...
and I certainly don't trust the intentions of any online poker room that refuses to even offer that option.
That's definitely your choice. But, as long as you are a tiny minority of the population, they won't care. And, you'll miss out on the money that can be won by playing against the newbies of the world who donate their money to other players.
If you take a simpler game with similar problems (unknown cards) like Black Jack their are well known counting techniques that even without knowing what the other player has in hand can be used to win at Black Jack.
Poker is just the same, just a bit more complicated.
In Black Jack, the dealer always behaves the same way -- hit on 16, stop on 17, for example. By knowing what you have, and what dealer has, it's relatively simple to calculate odds of you winning if you take another card vs. not.
In poker, the way current AIs work is by assigning a probability of the opponent holding a certain hand to every possible hand, and then using "statistics", as you say, to calculate the expected value of a call, raise, or fold... and the highest is picked (I'm oversimplifying, but that's the essence.). In no-limit, this gets much harder, because there is no simple 'raise', it's raise, and the amount... so, you have to simplify by looking at 'small raise', 'big raise', 'huge raise'... etc.
How the opponent is going to react to any of these is what's really hard to figure out for an AI. Does the opponent consider your huge raise to be huge, or does he think it's only a 'big' raise?
It's also very hard to assign good probabilities to each hand. You can use hang strengths to assign certain probabilities, but that's only if the opponent always play straightforward -- bet when you have a good hand, check when you don't... What do you assign when he calls your bet? A mediocre hand, or a good drawing hand, or a really good hand and he is slowplaying it?
Well, as you can see, because you don't have all the information available, you can't simply calculate the right move.
The bottom line is, there is no right move for every situation. That's why you'll never see poker problems in the newspaper like you do with chess.
(Playing the Pokerstars $20 NL tourney with 1170 other players right now )
:).
Good luck, I'm playing the same thing
That'd be 1, then. You may have meant 10e6.
No, 1^6 is 1, but 1e6 is 1,000,000. "e", in that context, stands for " x 10^ ", so 1e6 is 1 x 10^6.
Linux strikes me as more the OS of choise for tech types (engineers, IT pros, etc), as its much more robust at those type of applications than Windows.
Even engineers have to use the office tools for non-engineering work. The setup I have at work is a Windows machine with Exceed used to run shell and design apps on Linux servers that host the project files. That way you get the benefits of the Windows desktop for the office tools, and Linux for the design environment.
I do not know what I would do without access to the simple shell scripting tools in Linux (how the hell do I copy every file created on any day after 12PM in windows?).
Install cygwin and run the same script.