I work at Xerox PARC on this project, and am very happy to see all the interest. Have fun! I'm willing to take a stab at answering any questions posted under this comment.
Any waveform can be
decomposed into a set of sines and cosines
with certain amplitudes. This is called a fourier
transformation. For more details (including
how this works for discrete samples vs. continuous
functions and finite vs. infinite signals, I suggest "Signals and Systems Made Ridiculously Simple" by Zohar Z. Karu or "Discrete Time Signal Processing" by Oppenheim and Schaefer, depending on which direction you prefer to dive.) The mathematics are not obvious as postulated in the above post, and they are actually quite interesting.
Once you think of a signal as a collection of sines and cosines, the question is, "How can I make sure *all* those sinusoids are reproduced. The Nyqist Theorum says your must sample at least two times per period to reconstruct a sine wave. So, for example, if you want to reproduce a 20 KHz tone, your sampling rate must be at least 40 KHz.
A reasonable question is: how do I reproduce the sinusoids from samples, and the answer is "sinc interpolation" or "low pass filtering". Because it is impossible to build an ideal low pass filter, and expensive to make a good one, CD players sample at little generously at a bit over 44kHz. Since the upper range of human hearing is 20KHz (for children, us adults are lucky if we can hear 18KHz) the CD sampling rate can accurately reproduce all the frequencies you can hear.
However, one thing I learned as an engineer and when I was an intern at Bose Corp in college is that audiophiles tend to be a bit nuts and can convince themselves of anything, like that $3000 speaker cables with aligned metal grains improve sound quality. There's all sorts of impassioned claims that never stand up to double blind testing. So if you don't believe me -- that CD's work great and there is no need to fiddle with sampling rate and you will never tell the difference from a higher sampling rate -- it's ok, I'm used to it. Besides, who am I to complain if people are passionate about music:)
Huh? To rotate a JPEG, you will have to decompress
the huffman codes, swap the DCT coefficients and possibly do a sign change, swap corresponding quantization
values then re-apply huffman compression. Sure it's lossless, but that's hardlly "rotating while compressed"
A better phrase is "rotating without using inverse discrete cosine transforms."
And this only works for 90 degree rotations! Besides, why sweat JPEG when JPEG 2000 is around the corner.
tell the system to apply only security or high-priority fixes?
ask for only packages targeted at beginners?
These two problems (and many more not mentioned) can be addressed by having subdistributions. The could be a subdistribution of Debian that never changes except security fixes. There could be a subdistribution that only contains packages for beginners.
What you are asking for is many different perspectives on how to organize software collections, and this can be done by a multi-tiered distribution system with many middlemen. I finished a thesis
on this subject in 1997. Just read chapters 1,2, and 5 -- the rest talks about a specific design/implementation to address the problem that was, um, lacking.
Can someone comment on the likelihood that this is a genuine bug, vs. the possibility that the flaw was introduced deliberately by some party to weaken PGPi?
I guess I'd be interested in knowing how long the flaw has been in the code, and also who wrote this particular block of code.
I don't know about you, but I am currently orbiting the sun (which, to paraphrase some of the posts above, is basically "falling but missing")
Re:o/~ can't get there from here o/~
on
Solving Chess?
·
· Score: 1
Actually, it's a "every atom in the universe was a computer, and they all run in parallel, running 10^15 Hertz, examining one move per clock, and ran for the duration of the universe" problem.
The universe is about 15 billion years old, and there are about 19^79 atoms estimated by physicists. Do the math yourself.
Yeah, just think about how many people have had to suffer from Microsoft's monopoly supported defective products. A real remedy would involve forced bugfixes, and maybe some time quality time on Alcatraz.
Clearly this is off topic, but I want to know anyway. The shuttle has solid rocket boosters, that only fire for a little bit then break off. Why can't it have jet engine boosters, that do exactly the same thing. (But get more bang for the buck since they don't have to carry an oxidizer along with the fuel?)
To the porno folks and scam artisits who have given unsolicited email advertisements a bad name. THANK YOU!!! Because you left such a bad taste in everyone's mouth, most legitimate companies will think twice before flooding people's mailboxes with advertisements. I'm so much happier that society agrees with me that email advertisments are scourge; it's a much better situtation than the sorry state of acceptance when it comes to other media like TV or junk snail mail.
I keep hearing about these super tiny hard drives that IBM and company make. They're supposed to be about one square inch, and very thin, yet hold several hundred megabytes. That would be great, since it could hold a bizillion pictures (especially if it used a reasonable compression algorithm, like JPEG2000). Then, I'd love to just plug it into my hub's ethernet port and download the pictures from the camera's built in web server (I'd probably use wget to do the job.) Boy, that would be a great camera -- which neatly sidesteps a lot of ugly software issues.
No. The current US system is rigged to support centrist parties and repress small parties (which are often at the political extremes.) And I like it that way. 1930's Europe used proportional representation (without a 5% cutoff like they commonly have now) and look what political parties ended up with power.
Re:i'm sorry, but you continue to miss the point.
on
Microsoft Loses
·
· Score: 1
you are seriously deluding yourself by thinking that microsoft is responsible for most of the bugs in the computer industry.
A competitive market can provide incentives to produce better products at lower prices. A monopolized industry has no such incentives.
How many patches and bugfixes have there been for unix operating systems in the past?
Not sure. Given Microsoft reportedly has 60,000+ known bugs in windows 2k, and that Debian has something like 13,000 open bugs in their bug tracking systems (probably all very small fraction of the total), the number of unixes and years since UNIX was first developed, I'd roughly estimate somehwere in the tens or hundreds of millions.
How many times has netscape crashed on you?
Several hundred times. Netscape Navigator has a lot of defects. Probably more than the corresponding Microsoft product.
Just *who* decides what bugs should be fined?
Yeah, that would have to be worked out.
And should bugs in non-microsoft software be fined too?
Software defects are a major problem, and single line bugs are believed to have caused the loss of both the Mars Polar Lander and a British company's communications satellite during a recent space launch. However, in a non-monopoly situation, competitive market forces (hopefully) can encourage efficiency, and improvement in price or quality of goods over time. Monopolies are sheltered from market forces, and thus have less incentive to improve, leading to either government intervention to restore a competitive market, or regulation.
it mentions in the FoF the incredible amounts of money and man power microsoft put into Internet Explorer to try to make it a better quality product than Netscape
Software benefits from economies of scale. Free markets, left to themselves, can often lead to monopolies. Microsoft is not evil; they are big and succesful and have acquired a monopoly. They got to their current position, in part, by doing a better job than competitors.
However, Microsoft by vitrue of being a monopoly is sheltered from market forces. Microsoft doesn't have to worry about Internet Explorer making a return on investment, because people had no choice but to buy it -- the product was bundled with windows, which people have no choice but to buy. If we allow a company to be sheltered from market forces, then the only way to protect consumers is regulation. This is why the monopoly utility I buy water from is regulated.
[something nearly incoherent about Microsoft writing good software and adultery]
If you think Microsoft does a good job, think how much better they might do (or someone else might do, given the chance) in a competitive market. I think the software industry could do much better job in terms of quality in a competitive market. And if that can't be achieved, I'll settle for some quality-by-regulation. The amount of defects people put up with in software is ridiculous compared to other, non-monopolized industries.
However, [TeX's] scope is quite small in comparison to the applications of issue here (web browsers, operating systems).
TeX shows that software does not have to be shoddy by inherent nature. Microsoft can do better. Hell, if they lowered their defect rate by just a few orders of magnitude, I'd be happy.
in 5 minutes of searching, I was unable to find mention of any TeX-only bugs
Spend as many hours as you like searching. It is hard, but not impossible, to write defect-free software.
but I did find several sites with lists of LaTeX bugs. Perhaps we should start fining the makers of LaTeX, too, because their buggy macros are damaging the computer industry.
Laslie Lamport does control a monopoly. Thus, market forces can encourage improvements to LaTeX, or perhaps it will lose out to competitors. In the United States, regulation is typically considered less desirable than a competitive market (but more desirable than an unregulated monopoly.)
Oh no wait, the bugs in LaTeX were obviously Microsoft's fault. I forgot.
Why do you think the software industry puts out such shoddy products compared to other industries? Think for a little bit on what a competitve industry might have produced over the last decade versus what we got from a Microsoft monopoly. The opportunity costs have been enormous, and that's why we have anti-trust laws and why Microsoft ended up in court. Excuse me for noting that the aftermath of this trial could lead to a better software industry. Excuse me for wanting a rememdy that could actually be productive and helpful to previously shafted consumers. You're right that making bad product is not illegal in and of itself; but it is a natural consequnce of a company abusing monopoly advantages, and that is illegal.
The point is consumers are shafted because Microsoft has a monopoly. Being forced to ship non-defective products will either (1) end their monopoly because they can't do it or (2) introduce regulation to protect consumers, which is what the US does for other monopolies, such as utility companies. Microsofts monopoly powers hurts consumers -- it mean they don't have to be competitive in price or product quality. Ever wonder why software products are so much more likely to be defective than products from other industries? Microsoft's monopoly is a non-trivial part of that, and you are kidding yourself if you think otherwise.
name one software product that has ever been bug free
TeX.
best punishment: fix all bugs
on
Microsoft Loses
·
· Score: 4
How's this for a suitable pnuishment? Microsoft should be required, by law, to ship only bug free products. Think about it -- fixing all those bugs will require an enormous amount of work, and be very expensive; it's a suitably tough penalty. Further, this action will benefit Microsoft customers (who have been shafted for years by being forced by monopoly considerations to buy defective products). Plus, can you imagine Microsoft's appeal? What is Gates & company really going to say, "We demand the right to continue shipping defective products?" The specific details can be worked out (how much of a per bug fine will Microsoft have to pay, whether Microsoft can "sell" their current stock of existing products under a 100% revenue fine, etc). I sure wish I was a friend of the court right now. (Anyone from the Justice Department reading this?)
A.P. Newswire -- Talks between the United States Justice Department and Microsoft Corporation broken down today, as American and NATO troops rose to a heightened alert status. The Department of Justice has released photographs of former Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates sitting in an what appears to be an underground bunker, holding his hand above a large, red button. President Clinton has officially urged civilians to evacuate from Redmond, Washington, "as quickly as possible." At an emergency meeting of the UN Defence Council, Russia and England both made strong statements supporting "neccessary force, including air strikes, ground forces, whatever it takes." Thus far all parties are responding with "no comment" as to whether nuclear warheads are under consideration in case of conflict.
Microsoft headquarters also appears to be under a higher alert level, including employee badge checks. These events, combined with instructions transmitted over the US Emergency Broadcast Network to consider shutting down any and all machines running Microsoft OS and applications, for undisclosed "safety reasons", have caused only minor unrest and agitation. We spoke with one source, a computer industry veteran who wishes to remain anonymous at his Y2K survival bunker in Northern California. "Microsoft has breached three major financial and military facilities in the past week, possibly using a Windows NT back door. Electronic warfare between Justice and Microsoft has been escalating over the past week. I beleive it is only a matter of time before this e-war becomes a hot war." Our source pointed out that Microsoft has gained control of the top level internet domain.ms (by acquiring the formerly sovereign nation of Montserrat) and "may attempt to declare independence at any time." Meanwhile, angry computer users, carrying torches and pitchforks, shouting "You'll pay for our suffering" are rumored to be on route to Washington State, and growing by the minute. Some appear to be carrying laptops, cell phone modems, and homemade firewall penetration softwarwe. Microsoft was down one half of one point during trading today on light volume, before rallying to gain 2 points in the afternoon.
Look, all I want is to not press little silly alarm clock buttons, but rather program my alarm clock from my web broswer on a real computer. Things like "get up at 7:00am on weekdays, and 9am on weekends and holidays" is a lot easier when you aren't pushing dinky little alarm clock buttons from hell. Is that so much to ask??
I have an abit bp6 motherboard, and can't get a month of uptime, despite a massive amount of attention. (Custom kernels, noapic kernel parameters, bios updates, switching to ATA33, Hedrick's IDE patch) More importantly, it's not just me. Look at linux-abit and you'll see that basically nobody can get a month of uptime off of that motherboard, under either moderate or high load. I'm willing to go so far as to say that the BP6 is not stable under linux. I'm suspecting it's not stable, period. I would love to be proven wrong, and find out what sort of witch's brew abit recommends for that board.
Everyone keeps thinking and talking about local software. Think bigger.
LANS are getting more and more popular. I have one in my home. They are near ubiquitous in high tech workplaces. No matter how easy *BSD ports or Debian's apt-get is, there are economy of scale benefits of just maintaining ONE application collection, rather than a separate application locally on each machine of a LAN. It's really a separate problem space; packaging systems like DEB and RPM make installing software easier (reducing difficulty in installation). Distributed filesystems can reduce the amount of installations required (reducing redundancy of installations). What can't I take advantage of my friend's diligent use of apt-get just one IP address over? Why should I do redundant administration if I don't want to?
The next revolution in linux software distribution will be distributed filesystem friendly software collections; and I don't care if that distributed filesystem is Coda or Intermezzo or AFS or even lowly NFS. I just wish I knew the best place to throw my hat in to the ring and work on this right now. This is the one station where linux software collections have major room to improve.
X can be run remotely. Try: export DISPLAY=host:0 where host is a unix box that _has_ X installed. It works great. (Don't forget to give permission for the display to be used with xhost)
I always configure my non-X boxes by displaying on a remote machine with X; I even monitor resources with tools like lavaps, even if the box and display are physically many miles apart. Try it, it's fun.
Back in the Kasperov vs Deep Blue days, I was thinking about how the next round would go (assuming Kasparov won and there would be rematch) The idea was to have thousands of computers around the internet work together to compute chess moves, which really boils down to searching a huge tree (of possible board positions) for the best possible position (according to a static board evalutator) assuming optimal play y your opponent (again, using the static board evaluator). This is the famous minimax algorithm which I am sure you are familiar with. (Most of modern chess engines are about pruning the tree down a bit (alpha/beta pruning) and increasing brute force, thorugh specialized chess hardware.
The trick in making sure clients are trustworthy is to have them calculate results that are easily verified. For example, if a client reports that a move gives a particularly favorable position (so favorable that it beats all other client's suggestions), then it can be rechecked by the trusted server for correctness. It's fun, easy, and doesn't even require messing around with trusted hardware (i.e. the AMD post above) or trusted executables embedded with an obfuscated private key (a.k.a the netrek solution outlined by the nettrek keymeister above.)
But how does this work for quake? My chess example is all about hunting for an optimal solution that can be easily checked once found. Quite frankly, I can't think of any way of phrasing Quake 1 client functionality as a similar task. So, lets talk about another, hypothetical game, which we'll call, um, how about "Quake 4."
In Q4, computer assistance (targeting, dodging, whatever) is built in to the client. Even better, multiple computers may team up to collaborate on a superbot. (The "AI" would have to be moved from a bunch of heuristics (I assume) to something more resembling minimax. These superbots could either fight other superbots, or perhaps the Kasparov's of the Quake 4 world running manually.
Now, before you object that this doesn't sound very fun (having the computer do all the work) imagine if serious swordplay was introduced. The AI assisted parrying and blocking could end up similar to the sword fighting scenes in Princess Bride, with far more entertaining results than might be accomplished by humans banging away on their keyboards or mousbuttons trying to control every thrust.
The more sophisticated and subtle player actions can get, the more difficult they will be able to control without AI assistance, and there are some great games to be made in the future. And yes, I'm still pissed that Kasparov lost to Deep Blue, foiling a great opportunity for a collaborative computing rematch.
Oops, should have used "preview" -- it's really 10^7 times the lifetime of the universe to purely brute force chess, with a superfast, universe sized, parallel per proton computer. Same conclusion, though.
Slashdot Mirror
I work at Xerox PARC on this project, and am very happy to see all the interest. Have fun! I'm willing to take a stab at answering any questions posted under this comment.
However, one thing I learned as an engineer and when I was an intern at Bose Corp in college is that audiophiles tend to be a bit nuts and can convince themselves of anything, like that $3000 speaker cables with aligned metal grains improve sound quality. There's all sorts of impassioned claims that never stand up to double blind testing. So if you don't believe me -- that CD's work great and there is no need to fiddle with sampling rate and you will never tell the difference from a higher sampling rate -- it's ok, I'm used to it. Besides, who am I to complain if people are passionate about music :)
Huh? To rotate a JPEG, you will have to decompress the huffman codes, swap the DCT coefficients and possibly do a sign change, swap corresponding quantization values then re-apply huffman compression. Sure it's lossless, but that's hardlly "rotating while compressed" A better phrase is "rotating without using inverse discrete cosine transforms." And this only works for 90 degree rotations! Besides, why sweat JPEG when JPEG 2000 is around the corner.
tell the system to apply only security or high-priority fixes?
ask for only packages targeted at beginners?
These two problems (and many more not mentioned) can be addressed by having subdistributions. The could be a subdistribution of Debian that never changes except security fixes. There could be a subdistribution that only contains packages for beginners.
What you are asking for is many different perspectives on how to organize software collections, and this can be done by a multi-tiered distribution system with many middlemen. I finished a thesis on this subject in 1997. Just read chapters 1,2, and 5 -- the rest talks about a specific design/implementation to address the problem that was, um, lacking.
I guess I'd be interested in knowing how long the flaw has been in the code, and also who wrote this particular block of code.
I don't know about you, but I am currently
orbiting the sun (which, to paraphrase some of the
posts above, is basically "falling but missing")
The universe is about 15 billion years old, and there are about 19^79 atoms estimated by physicists. Do the math yourself.
Yeah, just think about how many people have had to suffer from Microsoft's monopoly supported defective products. A real remedy would involve forced bugfixes, and maybe some time quality time on Alcatraz.
And then be forced to fix all their bugs!
Clearly this is off topic, but I want to know anyway. The shuttle has solid rocket boosters, that only fire for a little bit then break off. Why can't it have jet engine boosters, that do exactly the same thing. (But get more bang for the buck since they don't have to carry an oxidizer along with the fuel?)
To the porno folks and scam artisits who have given
unsolicited email advertisements a bad name.
THANK YOU!!! Because you left such a bad taste
in everyone's mouth, most legitimate companies will
think twice before flooding people's mailboxes with
advertisements. I'm so much happier that society
agrees with me that email advertisments are scourge;
it's a much better situtation than the sorry state
of acceptance when it comes to other media like TV
or junk snail mail.
I keep hearing about these super tiny hard drives that IBM and company make. They're supposed to be about one square inch, and very thin, yet hold several hundred megabytes. That would be great, since it could hold a bizillion pictures (especially if it used a reasonable compression algorithm, like JPEG2000). Then, I'd love to just plug it into my hub's ethernet port and download the pictures from the camera's built in web server (I'd probably use wget to do the job.) Boy, that would be a great camera -- which neatly sidesteps a lot of ugly software issues.
No. The current US system is rigged to support
centrist parties and repress small parties (which are often at the political extremes.)
And I like it that way. 1930's Europe used proportional representation (without a 5% cutoff like they commonly have now) and look what political parties ended up with power.
A competitive market can provide incentives to produce better products at lower prices. A monopolized industry has no such incentives.
How many patches and bugfixes have there been for unix operating systems in the past?
Not sure. Given Microsoft reportedly has 60,000+ known bugs in windows 2k, and that Debian has something like 13,000 open bugs in their bug tracking systems (probably all very small fraction of the total), the number of unixes and years since UNIX was first developed, I'd roughly estimate somehwere in the tens or hundreds of millions.
How many times has netscape crashed on you?
Several hundred times. Netscape Navigator has a lot of defects. Probably more than the corresponding Microsoft product.
Just *who* decides what bugs should be fined?
Yeah, that would have to be worked out.
And should bugs in non-microsoft software be fined too?
Software defects are a major problem, and single line bugs are believed to have caused the loss of both the Mars Polar Lander and a British company's communications satellite during a recent space launch. However, in a non-monopoly situation, competitive market forces (hopefully) can encourage efficiency, and improvement in price or quality of goods over time. Monopolies are sheltered from market forces, and thus have less incentive to improve, leading to either government intervention to restore a competitive market, or regulation.
it mentions in the FoF the incredible amounts of money and man power microsoft put into Internet Explorer to try to make it a better quality product than Netscape
Software benefits from economies of scale. Free markets, left to themselves, can often lead to monopolies. Microsoft is not evil; they are big and succesful and have acquired a monopoly. They got to their current position, in part, by doing a better job than competitors.
However, Microsoft by vitrue of being a monopoly is sheltered from market forces. Microsoft doesn't have to worry about Internet Explorer making a return on investment, because people had no choice but to buy it -- the product was bundled with windows, which people have no choice but to buy. If we allow a company to be sheltered from market forces, then the only way to protect consumers is regulation. This is why the monopoly utility I buy water from is regulated.
[something nearly incoherent about Microsoft writing good software and adultery]
If you think Microsoft does a good job, think how much better they might do (or someone else might do, given the chance) in a competitive market. I think the software industry could do much better job in terms of quality in a competitive market. And if that can't be achieved, I'll settle for some quality-by-regulation. The amount of defects people put up with in software is ridiculous compared to other, non-monopolized industries.
However, [TeX's] scope is quite small in comparison to the applications of issue here (web browsers, operating systems).
TeX shows that software does not have to be shoddy by inherent nature. Microsoft can do better. Hell, if they lowered their defect rate by just a few orders of magnitude, I'd be happy.
in 5 minutes of searching, I was unable to find mention of any TeX-only bugs
Spend as many hours as you like searching. It is hard, but not impossible, to write defect-free software.
but I did find several sites with lists of LaTeX bugs. Perhaps we should start fining the makers of LaTeX, too, because their buggy macros are damaging the computer industry.
Laslie Lamport does control a monopoly. Thus, market forces can encourage improvements to LaTeX, or perhaps it will lose out to competitors. In the United States, regulation is typically considered less desirable than a competitive market (but more desirable than an unregulated monopoly.)
Oh no wait, the bugs in LaTeX were obviously Microsoft's fault. I forgot.
Why do you think the software industry puts out such shoddy products compared to other industries? Think for a little bit on what a competitve industry might have produced over the last decade versus what we got from a Microsoft monopoly. The opportunity costs have been enormous, and that's why we have anti-trust laws and why Microsoft ended up in court. Excuse me for noting that the aftermath of this trial could lead to a better software industry. Excuse me for wanting a rememdy that could actually be productive and helpful to previously shafted consumers. You're right that making bad product is not illegal in and of itself; but it is a natural consequnce of a company abusing monopoly advantages, and that is illegal.
name one software product that has ever been bug free
TeX.
How's this for a suitable pnuishment? Microsoft should be required, by law, to ship only bug free products. Think about it -- fixing all those bugs will require an enormous amount of work, and be very expensive; it's a suitably tough penalty. Further, this action will benefit Microsoft customers (who have been shafted for years by being forced by monopoly considerations to buy defective products). Plus, can you imagine Microsoft's appeal? What is Gates & company really going to say, "We demand the right to continue shipping defective products?" The specific details can be worked out (how much of a per bug fine will Microsoft have to pay, whether Microsoft can "sell" their current stock of existing products under a 100% revenue fine, etc). I sure wish I was a friend of the court right now. (Anyone from the Justice Department reading this?)
Microsoft headquarters also appears to be under a higher alert level, including employee badge checks. These events, combined with instructions transmitted over the US Emergency Broadcast Network to consider shutting down any and all machines running Microsoft OS and applications, for undisclosed "safety reasons", have caused only minor unrest and agitation. We spoke with one source, a computer industry veteran who wishes to remain anonymous at his Y2K survival bunker in Northern California. "Microsoft has breached three major financial and military facilities in the past week, possibly using a Windows NT back door. Electronic warfare between Justice and Microsoft has been escalating over the past week. I beleive it is only a matter of time before this e-war becomes a hot war." Our source pointed out that Microsoft has gained control of the top level internet domain .ms (by acquiring the formerly sovereign nation of Montserrat) and "may attempt to declare independence at any time." Meanwhile, angry computer users, carrying torches and pitchforks, shouting "You'll pay for our suffering" are rumored to be on route to Washington State, and growing by the minute. Some appear to be carrying laptops, cell phone modems, and homemade firewall penetration softwarwe. Microsoft was down one half of one point during trading today on light volume, before rallying to gain 2 points in the afternoon.
Look, all I want is to not press little silly alarm clock buttons, but rather program my alarm clock from my web broswer on a real computer. Things like "get up at 7:00am on weekdays, and 9am on weekends and holidays" is a lot easier when you aren't pushing dinky little alarm clock buttons from hell. Is that so much to ask??
What is your longest uptime?
I have an abit bp6 motherboard, and can't get a month of uptime, despite a massive amount of attention. (Custom kernels, noapic kernel parameters, bios updates, switching to ATA33, Hedrick's IDE patch) More importantly, it's not just me. Look at linux-abit and you'll see that basically nobody can get a month of uptime off of that motherboard, under either moderate or high load. I'm willing to go so far as to say that the BP6 is not stable under linux. I'm suspecting it's not stable, period. I would love to be proven wrong, and find out what sort of witch's brew abit recommends for that board.
LANS are getting more and more popular. I have one in my home. They are near ubiquitous in high tech workplaces. No matter how easy *BSD ports or Debian's apt-get is, there are economy of scale benefits of just maintaining ONE application collection, rather than a separate application locally on each machine of a LAN. It's really a separate problem space; packaging systems like DEB and RPM make installing software easier (reducing difficulty in installation). Distributed filesystems can reduce the amount of installations required (reducing redundancy of installations). What can't I take advantage of my friend's diligent use of apt-get just one IP address over? Why should I do redundant administration if I don't want to?
The next revolution in linux software distribution will be distributed filesystem friendly software collections; and I don't care if that distributed filesystem is Coda or Intermezzo or AFS or even lowly NFS. I just wish I knew the best place to throw my hat in to the ring and work on this right now. This is the one station where linux software collections have major room to improve.
I always configure my non-X boxes by displaying on a remote machine with X; I even monitor resources with tools like lavaps, even if the box and display are physically many miles apart. Try it, it's fun.
NEVER. NEVER. NEVER. Death and Taxes will long have
disappeared and chess will NEVER be solved by pure brute force.
The trick in making sure clients are trustworthy is to have them calculate results that are easily verified. For example, if a client reports that a move gives a particularly favorable position (so favorable that it beats all other client's suggestions), then it can be rechecked by the trusted server for correctness. It's fun, easy, and doesn't even require messing around with trusted hardware (i.e. the AMD post above) or trusted executables embedded with an obfuscated private key (a.k.a the netrek solution outlined by the nettrek keymeister above.)
But how does this work for quake? My chess example is all about hunting for an optimal solution that can be easily checked once found. Quite frankly, I can't think of any way of phrasing Quake 1 client functionality as a similar task. So, lets talk about another, hypothetical game, which we'll call, um, how about "Quake 4."
In Q4, computer assistance (targeting, dodging, whatever) is built in to the client. Even better, multiple computers may team up to collaborate on a superbot. (The "AI" would have to be moved from a bunch of heuristics (I assume) to something more resembling minimax. These superbots could either fight other superbots, or perhaps the Kasparov's of the Quake 4 world running manually.
Now, before you object that this doesn't sound very fun (having the computer do all the work) imagine if serious swordplay was introduced. The AI assisted parrying and blocking could end up similar to the sword fighting scenes in Princess Bride, with far more entertaining results than might be accomplished by humans banging away on their keyboards or mousbuttons trying to control every thrust.
The more sophisticated and subtle player actions can get, the more difficult they will be able to control without AI assistance, and there are some great games to be made in the future. And yes, I'm still pissed that Kasparov lost to Deep Blue, foiling a great opportunity for a collaborative computing rematch.
Oops, should have used "preview" -- it's really
10^7 times the lifetime of the universe to purely brute force chess, with
a superfast, universe sized, parallel per proton computer.
Same conclusion, though.