what i'm hearing about star craft 2 is that its a remake of the old game with a little more colour.
Roughly speaking, yes, but not exactly. Some skills have moved around: I've heard that Mind Control will now be available to overlords instead of dark archons. Some skills have changed a little: zealots will have the ability to move faster in short bursts (somewhat like the Stimpack). Some new concepts have been added: you now have a mothership, which I expect to be somewhat like a hero in Warcraft III.
But at its core, it's still zerglings vs. marines vs. zealots.
I don't think it should come as a surprise to anyone that people's racial biases are carried through to a virtual world from the real world. So in a sense, this whole article, aside from being informative about some interesting psychological tests and their results, is kind of one big 'no duh'.
I heard---sorry, I can't give you a reference, so mod me -1 Bad Scholar---about a very interesting psychological study. People are very good at post-hoc rationalizing, i.e. saying "well that's obvious", but if you ask them to predict the seemingly obvious outcomes of psychological studies, they do no better than chance.
It could have been that the characters in the virtual world were placed at the exact spot in the uncanny valley where we subconsciously cease seeing them as humans. So you can't a priori say with certainty what the outcome is.
Even if one can argue that this particular case is obvious, it's still good to have the hypothesis tested in a scholarly fashion---that is, with a good protocol, good evidence and good statistics.
There are lies, there are damned lies and there is anecdotal evidence:)
The process limit is 20. Anything requiring an additional process once this limit is reached [will run in one of 20]
That's probably reasonably sane. You need to do something in that direction, otherwise people can forkbomb you when you visit their page, by repeatedly opening the page in a new window.
I might want to up the limit to my personal value of 2*${maxtabs} since I can probably afford the extra overhead and want the benefits; oh well, would-be-nice != required.
The ha-ha- part is good, but there's a tendency to try to achieve good security by shutting up the people who explain why the bad stuff is bad.
Remember Dmitry Sklyarov, the Russian programmer who got imprisoned for five months in 2001 for saying that eBooks were encrypted with (so my story goes) essentially ROT-13?
Remember Black Hat (I don't recall which year), where Cisco tried to shut up a couple of dudes for pointing out Cisco's bad security?
Remember Ed Felten, who was bullied into shutting up about the findings of his research, which he was encouraged to do by the very people who later tried to shut him up? (I think it was on watermarking music). He was allowed to speak at a later date.
When it comes to IT security, blame the guilty parties: those who deliver bad security, not those who uncover it.
I'm not sure how well the principles of IT security applies to non-IT security, since most IT-security can be made nigh-unbreakable in most scenarios with good crypto and a little bit of the right hardware (i.e. CPUs with ring 0 and ring 3).
Sorry for the self-reply. The bit I commented on was taken from the article, so the title of my post should of course have been "Article Clarification".
This time, it's not only the slashdot editors that are lame;)
These inter-ISP sharing arrangements are known as 'peering' or 'transit,'
This makes it sound like 'peering' and 'transit' mean the same thing, and cover all traffic-sharing agreements. To my knowledge, that's not the case (and wikipedia agrees: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peering).
There are three types of relationships. In one, called peering, A and B accept traffic from each other and don't exchange money. In the two other, A accepts traffic and money from B, while B accepts traffic from A. From B's point of view, that's called transit, while from A's point of view it's called customer.
(I hope at least some of you learned something you didn't know already. Otherwise, I've wasted the interpipe transit peering capacity).
Yeah because you can't talk with people using MSN, ICQ, so on so on as long as they have an MSN, ICQ-compatible [so on so on] client and an account for that..
Emphasis added, as well as the second so-on-so-on.
And that's the key part: I have to have an MSN account, and an ICQ account, and a Yahoo account, and a Zephyr account, and a Gadu-Gadu account, and a QQ account, and a $PROTO account.
Then I need an MSN client, and a..., and a $PROTO client. If I'm really lucky, I can find one universal IM client that doesn't completely suck ass through a very thin straw when I want to IRC with it. If I'm really lucky, it supports all the protocols I want to use.
[If you can restrict yourself to MSN, Yahoo, ICQ and AIM, that client is bitlbee; I think it does XMPP too].
The promise of XMPP, if everyone use that protocol, is that Microsoft, Yahoo, ICQ and AOL can have their own networks and their own clients, but that everyone can talk to everyone in spite of that. Similar to how everyone can email everyone despite using different providers and software.
Would you want to have 20 email addresses with 20 clients in order to be able to mail all your friends?
Using available resources to do their job is what apps are supposed to do, after all...
In a similar vein, using available money to give you a place to live is what a home is supposed to do?
You seem to think that it's fine for an application to use all available resources. In and of itself, that's no big deal; you could save some money if it saved CPU usage, but let's ignore that.
The interesting bit comes when you run multiple applications. If the applications blindly hog all resources for themselves, you'll begin to swap memory out to the disk which is horribly slow, and the CPU will get contended, delaying the operations you want performed. Sure, the kernel may be a little smart about allocating resources (like always giving enough to your media player, and enough CPU to the app that's currently being interacted with, if the kernel knows this); however, there's limits to this.
If the applications try to be smart about resource usage (say, cache less stuff if RAM is more contended than CPU), they could easily oscillate, or converge to extremes: when one application frees up memory, the other grabs it and then either waits and grabs some more, or frees some which is grabbed by the first.
You get much better results running multiple applications if they don't all try to use all the resources themselves. Getting them to not do this is easiest done by keeping resource usage at a reasonable level at all times, whether contended or not.
Ugh. It's my hypothesis that one of the most effective way of killing a persons motivation to do something is to compel, force or coerce them to do it. I think the reason why this is so is that being stripped of freedom, of agency, is highly depressing; a feeling which contaminates the activity you're compelled to. ISTR there being a wikipedia page on the loss of agency being depressing, but I can't find it right now.
That seems to ring true with my own experiences; I didn't like school very much through high school, where attendance was mandatory (or at least coupled with not being punished by way of a much more difficult exam). Compare that with university where only one course had mandatory attendance and which I didn't like even though the subject matter was (for the most part) enjoyable and interesting. In every other course, attendance at every part (mostly those are lectures and TA exercise sessions) is voluntary yet I (try to) show up.
Also, science shows that if you make someone do two enjoyable tasks, they like it, but if you make one the reward of doing the other, they will enjoy the non-reward task less. Compare this to the story about a bunch of kids who harass an old man; he offers to pay them money to do it but reduces the payment over time (but never to zero) to the point at which the kids say it isn't worth it anymore.
My point isn't to say that the statement "people should get a good education" is wrong; I would love living in a world of critically thinking well-educated fellow human beings. All I'm saying is that if you force a good education upon people, you're likely to be fighting an uphill battle.
And, by the way, this optimizing is also why there is "IE32" and "ARM" specific code in Chrome.
I know Google has some clever coders, but I'm impressed beyond belief that they can get decent performance from a browser written to run on top of Internet Explorer version 3.2;)
(IE32 probably should be IA32, although ISTR it spelled IA-32 more often; for those not in the know, it's Intel Architecture, 32 bits, also commonly called x86).
Humans are imaginary? If we're not all cartesian about it, I'd say humans definitely exist. But in the spirit of your post, I'd say some are sqrt(2), while some are sqrt(1). Maybe that's too black-and-white, so perhaps we're an affine linear combination of all three?
(Does anyone else think about the episode where the bear kidnaps all the sqrts?)
That makes me think of nethack, which has a save mechanism I really like; it's tantamount to C-z'ing the program: it saves all state, and when you start the program again it loads your save file up for you. You only have one savegame slot, so the next time you save and load, you start where you progressed to during the last session. Similar to the first Diablo game.
I think that would work fine for Angband too; it's bad if something as trivial as a system shutdown means I lose my progress, but it's equally bad if abusing the save mechanism becomes the way to progress. Sure, in nethack you can backup your savegame, and then restore the "backup" to try the game from that point again if you regret what you did.
Just a quick comment from the left field (mama never taught me to be discrete): maybe they could stand in a ring instead (of a square) during their analysis of these complex issues, during their attempt to see what can be derived from the facts. That would seem more natural and rational; at least it's the norm.
There isn't room in society for people that do that.
Let me take that for granted. That's a great argument for doing things that prevent it from happening in the first place, but not for excluding someone from your society for life, unless you know that they will do it again.
Underneath my point is a deeper one: should prison terms be punitive or preventative? That is, do we lock people up to punish them, or to protect society from them? I'm sure the punitive aspect acts as a deterrent which in turns provides protection for society, but controlling for that, how should we balance the two factors?
I know there's a great element of ha-ha in the parent post, but there's also an element of -only-serious.
Isn't that what the second amendment is all about? You're allowed to carry weapons, such that you can defend yourself against both other citizens as well as an oppressive government (such as one that would deny you habeas corpus). You're also able to form a citizen militia that will overthrow such governments. However, such citizen militia needs access to weapons matching in quality (i.e. killing power) what the government has.
With that in mind, your habeas corpus truly is defended by your assault rifle.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." Said by Thomas Jefferson, an American politician of some note.
if ($hostname eq "slashdot.org")
$connection->drop();
There. Fixed it for both of you. Note that "==" does numerical comparison, so "foo" == "bar"; it works just like it works in C on numbers, so it should be obvious. Also, invoking methods (and accessing members) on objects is done with the arrow notation, not the dot notation, since behind the surface it's a pointer, so again it's intuitive just like C.
Sheesh, get with the program. And don't throw glass shards if you live under a rock:p
(please watch the tongue in my cheek before you mod me flamebait or troll
Slashdot Mirror
what i'm hearing about star craft 2 is that its a remake of the old game with a little more colour.
Roughly speaking, yes, but not exactly. Some skills have moved around: I've heard that Mind Control will now be available to overlords instead of dark archons. Some skills have changed a little: zealots will have the ability to move faster in short bursts (somewhat like the Stimpack). Some new concepts have been added: you now have a mothership, which I expect to be somewhat like a hero in Warcraft III.
But at its core, it's still zerglings vs. marines vs. zealots.
-- Jonas K
I don't think it should come as a surprise to anyone that people's racial biases are carried through to a virtual world from the real world. So in a sense, this whole article, aside from being informative about some interesting psychological tests and their results, is kind of one big 'no duh'.
I heard---sorry, I can't give you a reference, so mod me -1 Bad Scholar---about a very interesting psychological study. People are very good at post-hoc rationalizing, i.e. saying "well that's obvious", but if you ask them to predict the seemingly obvious outcomes of psychological studies, they do no better than chance.
It could have been that the characters in the virtual world were placed at the exact spot in the uncanny valley where we subconsciously cease seeing them as humans. So you can't a priori say with certainty what the outcome is.
Even if one can argue that this particular case is obvious, it's still good to have the hypothesis tested in a scholarly fashion---that is, with a good protocol, good evidence and good statistics.
There are lies, there are damned lies and there is anecdotal evidence :)
The process limit is 20. Anything requiring an additional process once this limit is reached [will run in one of 20]
That's probably reasonably sane. You need to do something in that direction, otherwise people can forkbomb you when you visit their page, by repeatedly opening the page in a new window.
I might want to up the limit to my personal value of 2*${maxtabs} since I can probably afford the extra overhead and want the benefits; oh well, would-be-nice != required.
Unfortunately, parent is ha-ha-only-serious.
The ha-ha- part is good, but there's a tendency to try to achieve good security by shutting up the people who explain why the bad stuff is bad.
Remember Dmitry Sklyarov, the Russian programmer who got imprisoned for five months in 2001 for saying that eBooks were encrypted with (so my story goes) essentially ROT-13?
Remember Black Hat (I don't recall which year), where Cisco tried to shut up a couple of dudes for pointing out Cisco's bad security?
Remember Ed Felten, who was bullied into shutting up about the findings of his research, which he was encouraged to do by the very people who later tried to shut him up? (I think it was on watermarking music). He was allowed to speak at a later date.
When it comes to IT security, blame the guilty parties: those who deliver bad security, not those who uncover it.
I'm not sure how well the principles of IT security applies to non-IT security, since most IT-security can be made nigh-unbreakable in most scenarios with good crypto and a little bit of the right hardware (i.e. CPUs with ring 0 and ring 3).
Wouldn't the spook with the fedora [...] be a giveaway?
Yeah; he should use Hidden Linux instead.
I think you just jumped the shark prion.
I know it's too much too ask for but if you actually go on to RTFA
You must be !new here.
Sorry for the self-reply. The bit I commented on was taken from the article, so the title of my post should of course have been "Article Clarification".
This time, it's not only the slashdot editors that are lame ;)
These inter-ISP sharing arrangements are known as 'peering' or 'transit,'
This makes it sound like 'peering' and 'transit' mean the same thing, and cover all traffic-sharing agreements. To my knowledge, that's not the case (and wikipedia agrees: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peering).
There are three types of relationships. In one, called peering, A and B accept traffic from each other and don't exchange money. In the two other, A accepts traffic and money from B, while B accepts traffic from A. From B's point of view, that's called transit, while from A's point of view it's called customer.
(I hope at least some of you learned something you didn't know already. Otherwise, I've wasted the interpipe transit peering capacity).
Yeah because you can't talk with people using MSN, ICQ, so on so on as long as they have an MSN, ICQ-compatible [so on so on] client and an account for that ..
Emphasis added, as well as the second so-on-so-on.
And that's the key part: I have to have an MSN account, and an ICQ account, and a Yahoo account, and a Zephyr account, and a Gadu-Gadu account, and a QQ account, and a $PROTO account.
Then I need an MSN client, and a ..., and a $PROTO client. If I'm really lucky, I can find one universal IM client that doesn't completely suck ass through a very thin straw when I want to IRC with it. If I'm really lucky, it supports all the protocols I want to use.
[If you can restrict yourself to MSN, Yahoo, ICQ and AIM, that client is bitlbee; I think it does XMPP too].
The promise of XMPP, if everyone use that protocol, is that Microsoft, Yahoo, ICQ and AOL can have their own networks and their own clients, but that everyone can talk to everyone in spite of that. Similar to how everyone can email everyone despite using different providers and software.
Would you want to have 20 email addresses with 20 clients in order to be able to mail all your friends?
Using available resources to do their job is what apps are supposed to do, after all ...
In a similar vein, using available money to give you a place to live is what a home is supposed to do?
You seem to think that it's fine for an application to use all available resources. In and of itself, that's no big deal; you could save some money if it saved CPU usage, but let's ignore that.
The interesting bit comes when you run multiple applications. If the applications blindly hog all resources for themselves, you'll begin to swap memory out to the disk which is horribly slow, and the CPU will get contended, delaying the operations you want performed. Sure, the kernel may be a little smart about allocating resources (like always giving enough to your media player, and enough CPU to the app that's currently being interacted with, if the kernel knows this); however, there's limits to this.
If the applications try to be smart about resource usage (say, cache less stuff if RAM is more contended than CPU), they could easily oscillate, or converge to extremes: when one application frees up memory, the other grabs it and then either waits and grabs some more, or frees some which is grabbed by the first.
You get much better results running multiple applications if they don't all try to use all the resources themselves. Getting them to not do this is easiest done by keeping resource usage at a reasonable level at all times, whether contended or not.
Not only should school attendance be required
Ugh. It's my hypothesis that one of the most effective way of killing a persons motivation to do something is to compel, force or coerce them to do it. I think the reason why this is so is that being stripped of freedom, of agency, is highly depressing; a feeling which contaminates the activity you're compelled to. ISTR there being a wikipedia page on the loss of agency being depressing, but I can't find it right now.
That seems to ring true with my own experiences; I didn't like school very much through high school, where attendance was mandatory (or at least coupled with not being punished by way of a much more difficult exam). Compare that with university where only one course had mandatory attendance and which I didn't like even though the subject matter was (for the most part) enjoyable and interesting. In every other course, attendance at every part (mostly those are lectures and TA exercise sessions) is voluntary yet I (try to) show up.
Also, science shows that if you make someone do two enjoyable tasks, they like it, but if you make one the reward of doing the other, they will enjoy the non-reward task less. Compare this to the story about a bunch of kids who harass an old man; he offers to pay them money to do it but reduces the payment over time (but never to zero) to the point at which the kids say it isn't worth it anymore.
(You may want to look at http://www.jstor.org/pss/1129350, although it doesn't say exactly the same as me).
My point isn't to say that the statement "people should get a good education" is wrong; I would love living in a world of critically thinking well-educated fellow human beings. All I'm saying is that if you force a good education upon people, you're likely to be fighting an uphill battle.
We're one step closer to a "Forget your first sexual encounter" pill.
Here on slashdot, we call that "placebo".
And, by the way, this optimizing is also why there is "IE32" and "ARM" specific code in Chrome.
I know Google has some clever coders, but I'm impressed beyond belief that they can get decent performance from a browser written to run on top of Internet Explorer version 3.2 ;)
(IE32 probably should be IA32, although ISTR it spelled IA-32 more often; for those not in the know, it's Intel Architecture, 32 bits, also commonly called x86).
Humans = sqrt(-1)
Humans are imaginary? If we're not all cartesian about it, I'd say humans definitely exist. But in the spirit of your post, I'd say some are sqrt(2), while some are sqrt(1). Maybe that's too black-and-white, so perhaps we're an affine linear combination of all three?
(Does anyone else think about the episode where the bear kidnaps all the sqrts?)
That makes me think of nethack, which has a save mechanism I really like; it's tantamount to C-z'ing the program: it saves all state, and when you start the program again it loads your save file up for you. You only have one savegame slot, so the next time you save and load, you start where you progressed to during the last session. Similar to the first Diablo game.
I think that would work fine for Angband too; it's bad if something as trivial as a system shutdown means I lose my progress, but it's equally bad if abusing the save mechanism becomes the way to progress. Sure, in nethack you can backup your savegame, and then restore the "backup" to try the game from that point again if you regret what you did.
That's called savescumming in the FAQ :)
So, since God has every perfection, he doesn't exist (except in Descartes' mind)?
Just a quick comment from the left field (mama never taught me to be discrete): maybe they could stand in a ring instead (of a square) during their analysis of these complex issues, during their attempt to see what can be derived from the facts. That would seem more natural and rational; at least it's the norm.
My English is not perfect
Yeah, you seem to be lacking a little aptitude; but take heart, it's not like you're speaking pidgin or anything. Your post has clearly evinced this.
HA HA HA. wtf, I kill myself.
On Sunday the 5479th of September, 1993, Stanislav_J wrote:
Really? I thought [the internet] ran on brain damage...
sdate(1) is your friend :)
There isn't room in society for people that do that.
Let me take that for granted. That's a great argument for doing things that prevent it from happening in the first place, but not for excluding someone from your society for life, unless you know that they will do it again.
Underneath my point is a deeper one: should prison terms be punitive or preventative? That is, do we lock people up to punish them, or to protect society from them? I'm sure the punitive aspect acts as a deterrent which in turns provides protection for society, but controlling for that, how should we balance the two factors?
I know there's a great element of ha-ha in the parent post, but there's also an element of -only-serious.
Isn't that what the second amendment is all about? You're allowed to carry weapons, such that you can defend yourself against both other citizens as well as an oppressive government (such as one that would deny you habeas corpus). You're also able to form a citizen militia that will overthrow such governments. However, such citizen militia needs access to weapons matching in quality (i.e. killing power) what the government has.
With that in mind, your habeas corpus truly is defended by your assault rifle.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." Said by Thomas Jefferson, an American politician of some note.
if some kid in Australia can gin up a convincing DMCA takedown
... then there's trouble brewing :)
"Do not make passwords that will embarrass me if I have to call in the phone"
How about passwords that will make you applaud Mr. Hirohito for his honesty?
if ($hostname eq "slashdot.org")
$connection->drop();
There. Fixed it for both of you. Note that "==" does numerical comparison, so "foo" == "bar"; it works just like it works in C on numbers, so it should be obvious. Also, invoking methods (and accessing members) on objects is done with the arrow notation, not the dot notation, since behind the surface it's a pointer, so again it's intuitive just like C.
Sheesh, get with the program. And don't throw glass shards if you live under a rock :p
(please watch the tongue in my cheek before you mod me flamebait or troll
Okay, now you can do it).