There are many factors that go into deciding how to write code. Portability is just one consideration of many. I would say that it is worth it if speed is of critical importantance and development expenses are of no concequence.
For instance, consider a video game. The faster it is the more likely it is that players will like it. But there are many more important factors including is the game just plain fun. So in video games, there is really a basic threshold of speed that needs to be met and after that is met, other factors are more important.
Next consider a real time system for trading stocks. This system is all about speed and reliability. You can control the deployment hardware and it is economically worthwhile to spent a lot in development if it makes more money in the long run. So coding your own memory pooler that uses the size of the pointer and a specific struct to make the code allocate and deallocate memory in constant time (it is very possible) is worthwhile because it can save alot of time per transaction.
But all of these issues come down to what exactly you are writing and both the technical and business requirements of your project. Without knowning those in advance, we can't really answer your question.
"The term is usually "monolithic kernel", rather than "macrokernel"."
It is even worse than that. A monlithic kernel means that almost everything (kernel, device drivers, filesystems, etc.) runs in kernel mode. A microkernel uses messaging to move everything but the kernel out of kernel mode. An exokernel runs on a skeleton of code in kernel mode and everything else (including the kernel) runs in userland. An example of an exokernel is QNX. An exokernel provides very very reliable system uptime but at the expense of performance.
I believe that Linux, Solaris, and BSD are all monolithic kernels as are the Windows kernels (NT and others). OS X is a microkernel.
The three types of kernels are a spectrum trading performance for reliablity. Like most everything else in programming it is a trade off between two inversly related goals.
What about AFS which stands for Andrew File System. It was developed at CMU and allows dynamic backup of data (it automagically copies you data to different physical volumes). I've never even heard about data being lost on an AFS system and it supports very high security too. Then just build your code on top of the UNIX commands or AFS file API. But then again, it might be a bit much for your requirements. I don't know of a windows client version but one might exist. And the wayback part you might have to write yourself but it might be supported as well. Check it out if you are interested.
I am tired of people touting the Semantic Web. It isn't a good idea just because it came out of the W3C. I'll explain...
The semantic web expects everyone to agree on one ontological framework (one master ontology) and further for each and every web page to markup parts of the page (or the entire page) by indicating parts of the ontology which refer to that piece of text. Then a search engine will come along and use the semantic information encoded in OWL (or some other RDF variant) to know what the page is able and to provide better search results.
The problem is that this process puts far far far too much responsiblity on the web page author. First, they must be aware of this obsecure project. Second, they must understand ontologies and markup their pages honestly. Third, they must maintain this knowledge against shifting ontologies, and the drift of human language both geographically and over time.
Ignoring for a second that people tend to spam search engines in the ever increasing competition for hits. Most people don't have the time, expertese or patience to add this information to the page. It will just be used to fool the search bot just like the meta tags that most search engines currently ignore.
There are good WSD (word sense disabiguation) technologies currently being developed that can figure out from context clues which meaning for a specific word is intended by the author. And these tools are generally built around wordnet which is the ontology that most AI researchers use (and it isn't in RDF, OIL, OWL or any of the other stuff from the W3C). AI researchers know the semantic web won't work because of the reasons outlined above and a few more I can't think of right now. Search engines are pretty good and will only be getting better with time. Quit pimping the semantic web. It only makes you look ignorate in the eyes of the AI community.
So Nuance already has a speech engine with telephony support. And they were going to tie it in with a Yahoo web service. It is both an easy thing to implement (ignoring the speech recognition for a moment) and an impractical use of the technology (from both a marketing and engineering perspective).
The problem is accuracy of the speech recognition which is known to be less than usable. And it is expected that anyone, with no previous training of the speech recognition engine is going to be able to speak any query including proper names into a low bit rate channel (telephony) and the engine will work? I think a few people are getting the cart before the horse on this one.
Speech recognition is really, really, really, really, really, really, really hard. And only usable under optimum conditions and when you can give the engine hints on what the user might say. Neither of which will be true for this usage of the technology. So this is a tempest in a teapot to be sure.
And do these guys get to leave with the entire speech recongition engine? That doesn't sound right. It is Nuance's flagship product. I would imagine that Yahoo will still have to license a SR engine from Nuance (since they just merged with Scansoft) or IBM.
And finally, why is this better than some WML or similar application designed for a phone that can leverage graphics and text on the screen? It seems that this is a complicated piece of technology looking for a problem to solve.
When gamma ray detectors were first put on satellites (to detect nuclear bombs being detonated on Earth) huge gamma ray bursts were found coming from around the universe. I don't think we have ever explained what causes them but they are even more energetic than supernova. Would this even be a possible candiate for the cause of such bursts? Or is it not energetic enough? The current popular explaination is these bursts are black holes being born. Can any astronomers here to explain this to a humble programmer?
Most Mail Server deployments are very very expensive to maintain. Exchange's TCO ranges from $140 to $230 per mailbox per year depending on who you ask. There are even a range of companies that provide tools that claim to reduce this TCO (I once worked for one that will remain nameless). Other mail servers have significant TCO's too. But I know of services that charge significantly less per mailbox per year so there must be some mail server software that can be maintained for significantly less. *Cough*
So an OSS solution for this type of software doesn't have the familiar advantage of cost due to it being free (as in beer). But this doesn't mean that this mail server software doesn't have a significantly smaller TCO. And the AJAX interface is a nice touch. But things like how well the software can handle disk failures, how easy it is to do backups, how easy it is to handle 1 million mailboxes, etc. are the factors that make mail server software succeed or fail.
Note: Exchange doesn't do any of these things well.
When making an application distributed, you must figure out how to replicate the memory the application uses to other machines and make sure that this replication and synchronization work is transparent to the logic of the application. But this replication and synchronization is far far far too expensive (computationally) if done naively. So either special system calls (which is what the recoding requires) or a redesign of how work is parcelled out to worker threads is necessary.
This is in addition to the handling of resources such as database connections and other shared resources across the distributed cluster. I'm not exactly sure what your specific needs are but when you separate threads across different physical memory spaces, it creates significant problems to overcome. If you just want to virtualize the application (so one machine, many virtual machines, one physical memory), then the recoding should be trivial. And I agree, in this isolated case, no recoding should be necessary. But most of the time, clustering entails spaning multiple physical memories, and thus the application needs to be designed to handle these difficulties.
For example, what if every airplaine seat had a 6 inch knife strapped to it, do you think for a minute there could be a repeat of 9/11? What if people were encouraged to posess guns resopnsibily for personal protection, do you think Columbine could have even started?
But I think native is just a bit vector. So implementing your own messages on top of it is possible assuming that you won't have to move messages between little endian and big endian machines and the compilers for the various machines implments the structs (or other data structures) the same in memory.
Think of it this way.
/* for each type of message make sure int messageType; is the first element of each struct and messageSize is the second element of each struct*/
typedef struct MessageStruct {
int messageType;
int messageSize;
/* some message data*/
} Message;
...
/* we send the message here*/
Message msg;
msg.type = messageType;
msg.size = sizeof(Message);
msg.data = someData;/* repeat for each part of the message struct*/
SendMessage(&msg, msg.size);
/* we receive the message here*/
MPIMessage msg;
if (msg.size == sizeof(Message)) {
Message *msg = &msg;
/* do stuff with message */
}
I think something along these lines should work. Just make a struct for each type of message your app has. Then check the size and type elements of the structs to determine which type of message you have recieved. You can also just make a struct with just a type and size field and copy the first 8 bytes of the message into that and use that to determine the type of message. I'm sure I am missing some implementation details, but something like this should handle your problem.
Your comment, while long and seeming well thought out, is completely off base about where computer graphics technology is going. PC gaming is what is dying, not OpenGL. Gaming is what drives graphics technology, not CAD. And with the consoles supporting keyboards in the next generation, types of games only suited for the PC(real-time strategy, etc.) will for the first time be practical on the consoles. While the Xbox supports DirectX, the other 2 major console platforms do not. OpenGL is the major way game companies develop and port games, now as in the past. Making OpenGL slow on the PC will just kill the PC gaming market faster. Not to mention that most PC games detect the appropiate hardward specific OpenGL driver anyway and don't use the default OpenGL driver provided by Windows.
And the default Windows OpenGL driver just wraps the drive specific version of OpenGL and only provides the graphics functionality if there is no hardward specific OpenGL implementation available. Perhaps this is just a stopgap for now, or perhaps this implemenation will only be used when there is no hardward specific OpenGL implementation. I can only hope, but don't let the facts get in the way of a good astroturf post. Not that you are the only one with this problem.
We've already discussed this idea on slashdot before so I'll just repost my previous comments:
Actually I had this same good idea a couple of years ago. It could effectly wipe out the slashdot effect. What if, each time server load went over a preset amount, it served a torrrent containing the HTML and image files instead of the HTML file itself. When the browser sees the torrent with special HTTP headers, it automagically unpacks the torrent after completing the download and displays the HTML locally. An apache plugin for this was started and never completed. The problem was getting the browser/torrent client to do the right thing once it got the HTML so the fact that you downloaded a torrent instead of the HTML directly was transparent to the user. Once torrent clients are embedded into the browser, competition will force the other browsers to include this feature. Then no more slashdot effect, yea!!!
From here
In Britain we use pints or litres. I've never heard of an ounce of alcohol. Ounces are usually reserved for illegal drugs.
Can someone help?
That is a fluid ounce. And i'm guessing that is 3.9 fl oz of pure alcohol. Guess the kegbot is set to lightweight. The Fraterity setting would be alot higher.
These types of independent agents can create interesting interactions. I assume that each agent has either common or individual goals/incentives. But the choice of these incentives is what determines what happens (at least it is a major determing factor), though it is unlikely that a person could predict the outcomes (if the system is complex enough). So how did they choose these goals/incentives? And are there penalities for over indulging (like eating too much to reproduce successfully, etc)? And what non-agent objects are in the system. People wouldn't do what they do unless they needed to manipulate their environment and compete for resources. Do these agents do the same?
Also, why have the agents develop a new language? Its just interesting to see what they do without having to guess what they are talking about. But it sounds like they are only mutating the nouns. But languages develop in different ways including different preposition structures (for instance old english had different forms of nouns instead of prepositions) different noun/verb/object orders, etc? Is this just being ignored?
And finally, human society is very complex. It is almost certainly a chaotic system meaning that any change in the initial variables makes predictions meaningless for the real world (the system to be predicted). So if they want to simulate human socities, shouldn't they make the agents mimic real people and their environment as closely has possible. It doesn't seem that this is what they are doing. If they are trying to predicte real societies, I think they are not close to this almost impossible goal.
Now we just need apache with an embedded torrent generation/serving (or at least just serving; it'd be simpler to configure, that's for sure) for bulk static content.:)
Actually I had this same good idea a couple of years ago. It could effectly wipe out the slashdot effect. What if, each time server load went over a preset amount, it served a torrrent containing the HTML and image files instead of the HTML file itself. When the browser sees the torrent with special HTTP headers, it automagically unpacks the torrent after completing the download and displays the HTML locally. An apache plugin for this was started and never completed. The problem was getting the browser/torrent client to do the right thing once it got the HTML so the fact that you downloaded a torrent instead of the HTML directly was transparent to the user. Once torrent clients are embedded into the browser, competition will force the other browsers to include this feature. Then no more slashdot effect, yea!!!
You can watch the current game live on fics (free internet chess server). It is interesting to see how Adams has adapted his strategy thoughout this series. This game, it appears (I'm not a grand master so take this with a grain of salt) that Adams traded agressively to shorten the game. At the time of this post, Adams was down a pawn (1 rook and 3 pawns to 1 rook and 2 pawns). It also appears that Adams should be able to even the material in the next couple of moves even though Adams is currently in check. Anyway, log on to www.freechess.org and ob 37 if you want to watch.
How about switching the thing off?
Its not that a game console is something like a desktop pc, running the whole day just to be quickly accessable....
The reason you shouldn't switch off your computer is to keep the electronics at a relatively constant temperature. Heating and cooling electronics causes the hardware to expand and contract which can damage the components over time. It doesn't have anything to do with constant access, otherwise people would switch off their computers at night. The same applied for consoles. The tradeoff is the amount of power used to keep the computer running.
For the visual sensors, because sensors don't rotate or change focus like eyes so different angles are needed, different viewing distances, etc. For other types of sensors such as radar are needed for handling situations such as very dusty conditions, blinding light, low light, etc.
How does a vehicle determin terrain density and route selection?
Well the route is handled with GPS and maps and the route is at least somewhat navicable so it just follows the route, but only to an inexact level of granularity. After that, visual sensors take over with the smaller adjustments for avoiding potholes and other obsticals.
Is it feasible to train a neural-net system to select a likely course, possibly with a set of hardwired rules as a base?
You seems to have alot of faith in neural nets. They aren't the magical end all be all of AI you seem to think. All they can do is learn a function, but for higher level planning they tend to not do so well. Also, for reasoning under incomplete information they tend to not do so well. Usually, these systems use multiple algorithms at multiple levels of reasoning and vote between different algorithms solving the same part of the problem. This is alot harder than you seem to think and I assure you that brute force techniques aren't being used, and further more aren't even possible. This is because a brute force technique would try all possibilities, but in this problem you must make a prediction and live with the results, just like real life.
What if someone made a film about how the very idea of this contest is "stolen" from Orwell's 1984. Then showed goose-stepping soldiers dragging Bill off to a reeducation camp.
All I can say is wow. Considering MS is the biggest stealer of ideas in history, the multiple levels of irony in this article make that Alanis Morissette song (or more precisely the fact that the song isn't ironic at all) pale in comparison. This can't be real. Would Microsoft be this dumb? Nah, I don't believe it. Good hoax though...
The reason people like the iPod is because of the interface. You could legally (and illegal) get music before the iPod. Companies made mp3 players. But the reason people got the iPod is because it had a good interface which people liked. Then the hype came in and it became large. If you are going to make an iPod killer your interface has to be natural and easy to use. Now what cell phone has that good an interface? Sure, some cell phones have okay interfaces, but it has have as easy to use an interface as a walkman or iPod to be an iPod killer. Otherwise, it is just so much typical marketing fertilizer.
MSaccess is used to run alot of small businesses (who think that Access is somehow better than Excel). It would be nice to see if Knoda would also support more db like functionality (like transactions maybe) with autocommit turned on so that it seemed to work like access. Also, if you could make this have some transparent SQL layer so it could be a front-end to real databases (mySQL, etc.). But another barrier for some to migrate has been overcome. Good work.
Per advice, I have begun to keep a plaintext file on my desktop computer with all my passwords in it and when they expire. My corporate IT guidelines are too secure for me, a legit user. So, I'll have to compromise security in order to comply with guidelines.
First mistake, having an IT policy that forces users to remember dozens of passwords. Second mistake, telling a user to put their passwords in a plaintext file on the desktop. Third mistake, posting that fact on/. without posting as AC.
I'm not making fun of you, but I feel for those admin b/c nobody would make such a policy unless forced by the higher ups.
Security is based upon three types of authorization: 1) something you know (password) 2) something you are (biometrics) 3) something you have 3) a key of sometype. Assuming that security is this important to your org, maybe you should get some type of thumb drive with a security credential and then you could use weak passwords safely. Or biometric fingerprint ids (now available from IBM) plus weak passwords. But the policy your network has in place is probably weaker (b/c I'll bet many people have these plaintext files) than a much slower password cycle.
Not that disease modeling isn't a good use of technology, but Tiger is a modeling tool that integrates geographic and temporal data (spacio-temporal is just a fancy word for that). But I think there are alot of other good uses for it. Some more popular and some much less. Let's see here:
Modeling historic data about
economic development
spread of religons
spread of political organizations
Modeling the spread of specific ideas
Modeling company sales data
Modeling battlefield deaths
Modeling a crime spree
Basically any thing that spreads over time can be modeled and viewed this way. Kinda neat.
I like OO but is isn't great for every task. For instance, logging (which is the default example for AOP) is really bad in OO. This is because you have to add something like
everywhere you want to log something. But with AOP you can used kleen operators (*, +, ?, etc) to add Log.printLog() to certain methods of certain objects. Aspects allow you to inject code into method call boundaries. But like all programming constructs it can be abused. This is because you might get an exception stack trace that indicates a specific method call has thrown an exception when the exception came from code inserted by an aspect. But other languages can be abused too (Perl anyone). So I think this type of critism of aspects says more about the critic than about the programming construct. I don't use C++ to implement logic evaluators (I would use Prolog or another logic or unification based language). Nor do I try to write OO code in LISP (despite the horrid OO extensions for LISP) because each language has it strengths and weaknesses. For each application choose the language that best suites the task.
On another note, I think these types of critisms are really from people who are afraid of learning new languages or skills. They have worked long and hard to get good at C (or Java or some other language) and don't want to have to learn another language. Well suck it up, there aren't many Fortran programmers anymore and if you want to keep working, you must keep learning new languages and skills. Not that you should jump on every bandwagon, but if I'm writing something that needs to be really, really fast I use C. If I'm writing something that needs to be maintainable forever and speed isn't that important I use Java. The best tool for the task.
Slashdot Mirror
For instance, consider a video game. The faster it is the more likely it is that players will like it. But there are many more important factors including is the game just plain fun. So in video games, there is really a basic threshold of speed that needs to be met and after that is met, other factors are more important.
Next consider a real time system for trading stocks. This system is all about speed and reliability. You can control the deployment hardware and it is economically worthwhile to spent a lot in development if it makes more money in the long run. So coding your own memory pooler that uses the size of the pointer and a specific struct to make the code allocate and deallocate memory in constant time (it is very possible) is worthwhile because it can save alot of time per transaction.
But all of these issues come down to what exactly you are writing and both the technical and business requirements of your project. Without knowning those in advance, we can't really answer your question.
It is even worse than that. A monlithic kernel means that almost everything (kernel, device drivers, filesystems, etc.) runs in kernel mode. A microkernel uses messaging to move everything but the kernel out of kernel mode. An exokernel runs on a skeleton of code in kernel mode and everything else (including the kernel) runs in userland. An example of an exokernel is QNX. An exokernel provides very very reliable system uptime but at the expense of performance.
I believe that Linux, Solaris, and BSD are all monolithic kernels as are the Windows kernels (NT and others). OS X is a microkernel.
The three types of kernels are a spectrum trading performance for reliablity. Like most everything else in programming it is a trade off between two inversly related goals.
What about AFS which stands for Andrew File System. It was developed at CMU and allows dynamic backup of data (it automagically copies you data to different physical volumes). I've never even heard about data being lost on an AFS system and it supports very high security too. Then just build your code on top of the UNIX commands or AFS file API. But then again, it might be a bit much for your requirements. I don't know of a windows client version but one might exist. And the wayback part you might have to write yourself but it might be supported as well. Check it out if you are interested.
The semantic web expects everyone to agree on one ontological framework (one master ontology) and further for each and every web page to markup parts of the page (or the entire page) by indicating parts of the ontology which refer to that piece of text. Then a search engine will come along and use the semantic information encoded in OWL (or some other RDF variant) to know what the page is able and to provide better search results.
The problem is that this process puts far far far too much responsiblity on the web page author. First, they must be aware of this obsecure project. Second, they must understand ontologies and markup their pages honestly. Third, they must maintain this knowledge against shifting ontologies, and the drift of human language both geographically and over time.
Ignoring for a second that people tend to spam search engines in the ever increasing competition for hits. Most people don't have the time, expertese or patience to add this information to the page. It will just be used to fool the search bot just like the meta tags that most search engines currently ignore.
There are good WSD (word sense disabiguation) technologies currently being developed that can figure out from context clues which meaning for a specific word is intended by the author. And these tools are generally built around wordnet which is the ontology that most AI researchers use (and it isn't in RDF, OIL, OWL or any of the other stuff from the W3C). AI researchers know the semantic web won't work because of the reasons outlined above and a few more I can't think of right now. Search engines are pretty good and will only be getting better with time. Quit pimping the semantic web. It only makes you look ignorate in the eyes of the AI community.
The problem is accuracy of the speech recognition which is known to be less than usable. And it is expected that anyone, with no previous training of the speech recognition engine is going to be able to speak any query including proper names into a low bit rate channel (telephony) and the engine will work? I think a few people are getting the cart before the horse on this one.
Speech recognition is really, really, really, really, really, really, really hard. And only usable under optimum conditions and when you can give the engine hints on what the user might say. Neither of which will be true for this usage of the technology. So this is a tempest in a teapot to be sure.
And do these guys get to leave with the entire speech recongition engine? That doesn't sound right. It is Nuance's flagship product. I would imagine that Yahoo will still have to license a SR engine from Nuance (since they just merged with Scansoft) or IBM.
And finally, why is this better than some WML or similar application designed for a phone that can leverage graphics and text on the screen? It seems that this is a complicated piece of technology looking for a problem to solve.
When gamma ray detectors were first put on satellites (to detect nuclear bombs being detonated on Earth) huge gamma ray bursts were found coming from around the universe. I don't think we have ever explained what causes them but they are even more energetic than supernova. Would this even be a possible candiate for the cause of such bursts? Or is it not energetic enough? The current popular explaination is these bursts are black holes being born. Can any astronomers here to explain this to a humble programmer?
So an OSS solution for this type of software doesn't have the familiar advantage of cost due to it being free (as in beer). But this doesn't mean that this mail server software doesn't have a significantly smaller TCO. And the AJAX interface is a nice touch. But things like how well the software can handle disk failures, how easy it is to do backups, how easy it is to handle 1 million mailboxes, etc. are the factors that make mail server software succeed or fail.
Note: Exchange doesn't do any of these things well.
This is in addition to the handling of resources such as database connections and other shared resources across the distributed cluster. I'm not exactly sure what your specific needs are but when you separate threads across different physical memory spaces, it creates significant problems to overcome. If you just want to virtualize the application (so one machine, many virtual machines, one physical memory), then the recoding should be trivial. And I agree, in this isolated case, no recoding should be necessary. But most of the time, clustering entails spaning multiple physical memories, and thus the application needs to be designed to handle these difficulties.
I can tell that you don't read Fark
Think of it this way.
typedef struct MessageStruct {
int messageType;
int messageSize;
} Message;
Message msg;
msg.type = messageType;
msg.size = sizeof(Message);
msg.data = someData; /* repeat for each part of the message struct*/
SendMessage(&msg, msg.size);
MPIMessage msg;
if (msg.size == sizeof(Message)) {
Message *msg = &msg;
}
I think something along these lines should work. Just make a struct for each type of message your app has. Then check the size and type elements of the structs to determine which type of message you have recieved. You can also just make a struct with just a type and size field and copy the first 8 bytes of the message into that and use that to determine the type of message. I'm sure I am missing some implementation details, but something like this should handle your problem.
And the default Windows OpenGL driver just wraps the drive specific version of OpenGL and only provides the graphics functionality if there is no hardward specific OpenGL implementation available. Perhaps this is just a stopgap for now, or perhaps this implemenation will only be used when there is no hardward specific OpenGL implementation. I can only hope, but don't let the facts get in the way of a good astroturf post. Not that you are the only one with this problem.
Actually I had this same good idea a couple of years ago. It could effectly wipe out the slashdot effect. What if, each time server load went over a preset amount, it served a torrrent containing the HTML and image files instead of the HTML file itself. When the browser sees the torrent with special HTTP headers, it automagically unpacks the torrent after completing the download and displays the HTML locally. An apache plugin for this was started and never completed. The problem was getting the browser/torrent client to do the right thing once it got the HTML so the fact that you downloaded a torrent instead of the HTML directly was transparent to the user. Once torrent clients are embedded into the browser, competition will force the other browsers to include this feature. Then no more slashdot effect, yea!!! From here
That is a fluid ounce. And i'm guessing that is 3.9 fl oz of pure alcohol. Guess the kegbot is set to lightweight. The Fraterity setting would be alot higher.
Also, why have the agents develop a new language? Its just interesting to see what they do without having to guess what they are talking about. But it sounds like they are only mutating the nouns. But languages develop in different ways including different preposition structures (for instance old english had different forms of nouns instead of prepositions) different noun/verb/object orders, etc? Is this just being ignored?
And finally, human society is very complex. It is almost certainly a chaotic system meaning that any change in the initial variables makes predictions meaningless for the real world (the system to be predicted). So if they want to simulate human socities, shouldn't they make the agents mimic real people and their environment as closely has possible. It doesn't seem that this is what they are doing. If they are trying to predicte real societies, I think they are not close to this almost impossible goal.
Actually I had this same good idea a couple of years ago. It could effectly wipe out the slashdot effect. What if, each time server load went over a preset amount, it served a torrrent containing the HTML and image files instead of the HTML file itself. When the browser sees the torrent with special HTTP headers, it automagically unpacks the torrent after completing the download and displays the HTML locally. An apache plugin for this was started and never completed. The problem was getting the browser/torrent client to do the right thing once it got the HTML so the fact that you downloaded a torrent instead of the HTML directly was transparent to the user. Once torrent clients are embedded into the browser, competition will force the other browsers to include this feature. Then no more slashdot effect, yea!!!
You can watch the current game live on fics (free internet chess server). It is interesting to see how Adams has adapted his strategy thoughout this series. This game, it appears (I'm not a grand master so take this with a grain of salt) that Adams traded agressively to shorten the game. At the time of this post, Adams was down a pawn (1 rook and 3 pawns to 1 rook and 2 pawns). It also appears that Adams should be able to even the material in the next couple of moves even though Adams is currently in check. Anyway, log on to www.freechess.org and ob 37 if you want to watch.
The reason you shouldn't switch off your computer is to keep the electronics at a relatively constant temperature. Heating and cooling electronics causes the hardware to expand and contract which can damage the components over time. It doesn't have anything to do with constant access, otherwise people would switch off their computers at night. The same applied for consoles. The tradeoff is the amount of power used to keep the computer running.
For the visual sensors, because sensors don't rotate or change focus like eyes so different angles are needed, different viewing distances, etc. For other types of sensors such as radar are needed for handling situations such as very dusty conditions, blinding light, low light, etc.
How does a vehicle determin terrain density and route selection?
Well the route is handled with GPS and maps and the route is at least somewhat navicable so it just follows the route, but only to an inexact level of granularity. After that, visual sensors take over with the smaller adjustments for avoiding potholes and other obsticals.
Is it feasible to train a neural-net system to select a likely course, possibly with a set of hardwired rules as a base?
You seems to have alot of faith in neural nets. They aren't the magical end all be all of AI you seem to think. All they can do is learn a function, but for higher level planning they tend to not do so well. Also, for reasoning under incomplete information they tend to not do so well. Usually, these systems use multiple algorithms at multiple levels of reasoning and vote between different algorithms solving the same part of the problem. This is alot harder than you seem to think and I assure you that brute force techniques aren't being used, and further more aren't even possible. This is because a brute force technique would try all possibilities, but in this problem you must make a prediction and live with the results, just like real life.
All I can say is wow. Considering MS is the biggest stealer of ideas in history, the multiple levels of irony in this article make that Alanis Morissette song (or more precisely the fact that the song isn't ironic at all) pale in comparison. This can't be real. Would Microsoft be this dumb? Nah, I don't believe it. Good hoax though...
with a Bush flunky. I feel so dirty. I'm going to take a shower now
The reason people like the iPod is because of the interface. You could legally (and illegal) get music before the iPod. Companies made mp3 players. But the reason people got the iPod is because it had a good interface which people liked. Then the hype came in and it became large. If you are going to make an iPod killer your interface has to be natural and easy to use. Now what cell phone has that good an interface? Sure, some cell phones have okay interfaces, but it has have as easy to use an interface as a walkman or iPod to be an iPod killer. Otherwise, it is just so much typical marketing fertilizer.
MSaccess is used to run alot of small businesses (who think that Access is somehow better than Excel). It would be nice to see if Knoda would also support more db like functionality (like transactions maybe) with autocommit turned on so that it seemed to work like access. Also, if you could make this have some transparent SQL layer so it could be a front-end to real databases (mySQL, etc.). But another barrier for some to migrate has been overcome. Good work.
First mistake, having an IT policy that forces users to remember dozens of passwords. Second mistake, telling a user to put their passwords in a plaintext file on the desktop. Third mistake, posting that fact on /. without posting as AC.
I'm not making fun of you, but I feel for those admin b/c nobody would make such a policy unless forced by the higher ups.
Security is based upon three types of authorization: 1) something you know (password) 2) something you are (biometrics) 3) something you have 3) a key of sometype. Assuming that security is this important to your org, maybe you should get some type of thumb drive with a security credential and then you could use weak passwords safely. Or biometric fingerprint ids (now available from IBM) plus weak passwords. But the policy your network has in place is probably weaker (b/c I'll bet many people have these plaintext files) than a much slower password cycle.
Basically any thing that spreads over time can be modeled and viewed this way. Kinda neat.
Log.printLog("some message " + someObject.toString());
everywhere you want to log something. But with AOP you can used kleen operators (*, +, ?, etc) to add Log.printLog() to certain methods of certain objects. Aspects allow you to inject code into method call boundaries. But like all programming constructs it can be abused. This is because you might get an exception stack trace that indicates a specific method call has thrown an exception when the exception came from code inserted by an aspect. But other languages can be abused too (Perl anyone). So I think this type of critism of aspects says more about the critic than about the programming construct. I don't use C++ to implement logic evaluators (I would use Prolog or another logic or unification based language). Nor do I try to write OO code in LISP (despite the horrid OO extensions for LISP) because each language has it strengths and weaknesses. For each application choose the language that best suites the task.
On another note, I think these types of critisms are really from people who are afraid of learning new languages or skills. They have worked long and hard to get good at C (or Java or some other language) and don't want to have to learn another language. Well suck it up, there aren't many Fortran programmers anymore and if you want to keep working, you must keep learning new languages and skills. Not that you should jump on every bandwagon, but if I'm writing something that needs to be really, really fast I use C. If I'm writing something that needs to be maintainable forever and speed isn't that important I use Java. The best tool for the task.