I've had some (but not too much) martial arts training. It's been somewhat mixed, with striking, grappling, ground fighting, and some weapons training.
Size is a very picky issue. In general, size will give one an advantage, but it won't always determine the outcome of a fight.
I agree with a lot of the sentiment here, that most opponents aren't doing a terribly good job of resisting and thus provide very limited training. That's sport karate; it's all about the motions and looking good.
But if you find a good school who teaches street karate, you'll learn that size isn't quite so vital. Sure, size helps being able to take a hit, and it helps being able to dish out. But everyone (EVERYONE) has weaknesses. If a big guy happens to miss a little woman's weaknesses, and the little woman happens to hit him in his, she will prevail. People can be surprised, the human body has weak points (solar plexus, eyes, ears, armpits, underneath the chin, etc). If you know how to hit, and where to hit, size doesn't matter nearly as much.
You'll notice something common about all these stories of old people or women who "toss big guys around." The guy who gets tossed is always surprised. If you catch big people off guard you can drop them easily. But it helps a whoooole lot more if you're bigger than them.
1) Massive debt - I thought the President had a hand in the budget, or at least made "requests" that are usually granted. IMO, he should share accountability for the massive debt if he had a hand in setting up the budget.
2) Illegal war - I will concede this point. It was a holdover from the parent's post. However, I think the parent meant to imply that the President lied in order to get Congress to authorize the use of force against Iraq. However, Clinton showed us that the President isn't accountable for lying.
3a) Warrantless wiretaps - If it can be proven? I was under the impression that the President admitted to warrantless wiretaps.
4) Guantanamo - I didn't mention Guantanamo, but I was under the impression that he is involved in the chain of command. You cite the Constitution but this Administration has already shown its disregard for that document with reference to the warrantless wiretaps. While Congress may be accountable, I believe Bush is at least partly responsible.
5) Profiteering - Ha, I notice that you don't try to refute such a claim. You are correct, however, that punishing this Administration's abuse of its power to gain money is nigh impossible.
Sometimes I wonder if anyone has compiled a definitive list of all the ways in which GW has fucked America, sorted into proven, highly probable, possible, improbable, and impossible categories.
Recall previous studies (whose links I'm too lazy to dig up) where monkeys had to be trained with a real joystick and the neurons in their brain had to learn how to interface to the new toy.
A true, intuitive neural interface that would allow you to just sit and play without taking the time to learn a new interface
I'd say that the opposite is true. You would probably have to spend time teaching the neurons in your brain how to talk to the interface.
1) The Cell supports a Secure Processing Vault. This is basically hardware-based memory protection; since the OS is software, and software can be compromised, so can the OS. The hardware can't be compromised so easily, so you load up a SPE with some code and data, and then it engages its own memory protection, preventing anyone from reading/writing its memory until it's done, by which time it deletes the important information. So you can't peek at the decrypted results, because they're encrypted when they're loaded, and the decrypted results are deleted when it's done doing its work (which work gets re-encrypted before it leaves the SPE). There's a small communication channel left open, and it's the SPE's duty to protect it.
2) It also has a Runtime Secure Boot. This involves using a cryptographically signed BIOS. This verifies that the BIOS is trusted. From here, any time control is handed over to another program, it first must be cryptographically verified. This prevents unauthorized or compromised code from executing.
3) Once you've securely booted and your SPE is in isolation mode, protected from the eyes of other threads, you have access to The Root Key. The Root Key is stored in hardware, can't be accessed by software, and is used to decrypt other keys. These other keys are then used to do encryption in an individual SPE.
So, we make a key, stick it in some flip flops that you can't read, isolate an SPE to provide memory protection, and then authenticate each and every piece of code from the BIOS through to the currently executing thread. Everything going in is encrypted, isolated when the work is being done, and gets re-encrypted before leaving to the next module, all using encrypted keys. Pretty thick stuff.
3. Popular culture that denigrates "geeks" and "nerds" and makes it a social crime to get A's? Check.
Yeah. You certainly don't wanna be the guy who broke the curve. Especially if some of the class knows where you park.
Shit like this pisses me off. Both my high school and my college chose speakers at graduation based on popularity. Both times I had the highest GPA of anyone in the class. I was never allowed to speak at graduation, or say anything.
The only incentive one has for overachieving is success in the workplace, and you might not even see that. And the payment is years of punishment at the hands of your peers.
Game gets released, costs too much, only hardcore buy it, sales (=demand) drops, supply remains the same, cost goes down, sales (=demand) goes back up...
I hardly ever buy games when they get released. It's still the same game a month later, and $10 cheaper.
Lots of other comments have made clear the point that it's not easy to program this kind of hardware. Typical software programs run in a very sequential manner. In fact, trying to get cooperative parallel execution of threads is known to be a major sticking point in the average programmer's education.
Hardware, on the other hand, is massively parallel. All the "gates" (*) are all running all the time. It's like multi-threading a program, taken to the limit of infinity. However, if designed correctly, this thing can scale beyond belief, since it's all parallel.
It's also important to note that it's a Virtex4 on that card. That's one hell of an FPGA, they sure aren't cutting any corners. I'm not sure which one they're using, but some Virtex4 chips have PowerPC processors at 450 MHz.
This is definitely a niche product for now, due mainly to the lack of people who can write code in Hardware Description Languages (HDLs). But if you can figure it out, and you have an application that works on a massive scale, this may be for you.
Oh, and for all you detractors who are saying "that thing only runs at 500 MHz! How is it supposed to be faster than my 2 GHz AMD chip?" You're forgetting one very important factor. Your AMD chip executes one instruction at a time, and the important instructions are surrounded by instructions whose sole purpose is to control program flow or move data back and forth. However, the XtremeDSP slices of a Virtex4 can each execute a multiply and an add in a single cycle, and there are up to 512 of them in the most hardcore Virtex4 chip, and other logic executing in parallel can control the "program flow" and ferry data back and forth across the bus.
*: Modern FPGAs are actually built out of SRAMs that can implement arbitrary logic functions. They're no longer arrays of gates, so to speak.
I would venture to say most algorithms are simple. They check to see if the input is occurring faster than humanly possible and if so, ignore it.
However, if you could adjust the rate of rapid fire, and add some small amount of noise to the period of the rate, you could probably fool most rapid fire detection algorithms.
At least, that was the premise when I was building my hack of the DualShock 2 controller.
Am I the only one interested in the method by which that iClub thing (last link in summary) works?
Come on! I wanna know what sensors they put on people and in the clubs, and then I wanna know how they turn the raw data from those sensors into usable data like position in 3d space and orientation.
Is this stuff patented? Patents are public record...
Haha! Reverse patent trolling!
1) Search patent database for good patents 2) Come up with awesome idea using the patent 3) License patent from owner cheaply 4) Release super-awesome product-of-the-century 5)... 6) PROFIT!
Not everyone will use the same tag. Thus you get to come up with an (average) percentage of confidence. Then you can cross-correlate this against some words that occur in all the given samples, and have some sort of confidence metric about your measurement.
From here, you might be surprised at the different kinds of trends you might find. A spike in the number of people who happen to be excited about the latest fansub of Naruto, for instance. Hm, I bet that means that episode is good.
You might also be able to do longitudinal studies of the information, based on mood with respect to a specific event. Say, Katrina.
But say we take, I dunno, the whole planet...and just douse it in some radiation. Just enough to cause a variety of small, minor mutations in a very large (or the entire) population.
1) Any ones that result in sterility are gone, end of story...
2) Lots of small minor mutations is more like tickling the DNA, whereas massive exposure and major mutations is more like kicking it. This results in a greater survival ratio.
Transiently accelerate evolution, yanno? Maybe the dinosaurs didn't all die off, but collectively evolved one day when the magnetic poles flipped, dropping the protection from the Sun's radiation, and everyone was exposed to just a bit too much radiation. *shrugs*
Regardless, I think it's almost dishonorable not to study the effect radiation had on nature. Those poor cells are suffering, aren't they? Don't make them suffer for nothing.
Preface: My Senior project for college was reverse engineering the DualShock2 communication protocol and adding major modifications and upgrades, like adjustable rapid-fire, real-time macros, completely reconfigurable buttons, and some rudimentary motion sensitivity.
Let me attest that it is VERY hard to get motion sensitivity right. I was using a 2-axis 2g accelerometer to try measuring gravity, and mapping the orientation of the controller with respect to the gravity vector onto the left analog stick's horizontal axis.
I tried for a good three weeks, attempting to perfect an algorithm for smooth playback. In the end, I couldn't get something that worked universally for all games. It turns out that the DualShock2's analog sticks are pathetic. They jitter around their "center value", and I use that term lightly because "center" could be anywhere from 0x70 to 0x90. Meanwhile, a Mad Catz controller returned 0x7F dead on every time.
So part of the problem is building a reliable interface. I think this is why Nintendo is rumored to use several different sensors. I've heard stuff about IR, ultrasonic, gyros, accelerometers, etc.
Now, if the response of these sensors is very well understood and presented to developers in an intuitive manner, and they're consistent, then this could take off. But those are the biggest issues: getting consistent, reliable information from the sensors, and effectively decoding that information into game inputs.
Not only does SSE3 have those hardware thread sync instructions (which I thought were mainly for HyperThreading) but the other math instructions are supposed to be helpful for complex numbers.
SSE3 isn't exactly new, either...it's been around since Prescott (about two years as of now).
I recall that Intel's internal data paths were 64-bits wide, which meant SSE's 128 bit operations were actually hacks. I'm not sure if AMD had a similar hack, or if they included real 128-bit data paths. I know Merom/Core/NGMA is supposed to have true 128-bit data paths, so SSE will be even better.
This past IDF saw the unveiling of some significant details about this new microarchitecture, which was formerly called "Merom" but now goes by the official name of "Core."
Note the difference in code names. Processors based off the Core microarchitecture were codenamed Merom. However, processors based off of dual-core Pentium M's were codenamed Yonah.
What information do you really have?
Steve Jones. Fairly generic American names.
My wager is, if you were really that interested, you could narrow it down to a few people. But there has to be more than one guy with such a generic name who is 39 years old and married with two kids.
Knowing the/. crowd, though, someone's going to go googling, find this guy's home address and telephone number, and post it in a comment.
It might end up that those aren't even his real names, and just a pseudonym. Such is the price of infamy.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't that the premise behind Doublethink?
What OS do they use for cars?
Probably whatever real-time OS they have available for the MCU which gets chosen.
I'd laugh if they used PICs.
I've had some (but not too much) martial arts training. It's been somewhat mixed, with striking, grappling, ground fighting, and some weapons training.
Size is a very picky issue. In general, size will give one an advantage, but it won't always determine the outcome of a fight.
I agree with a lot of the sentiment here, that most opponents aren't doing a terribly good job of resisting and thus provide very limited training. That's sport karate; it's all about the motions and looking good.
But if you find a good school who teaches street karate, you'll learn that size isn't quite so vital. Sure, size helps being able to take a hit, and it helps being able to dish out. But everyone (EVERYONE) has weaknesses. If a big guy happens to miss a little woman's weaknesses, and the little woman happens to hit him in his, she will prevail. People can be surprised, the human body has weak points (solar plexus, eyes, ears, armpits, underneath the chin, etc). If you know how to hit, and where to hit, size doesn't matter nearly as much.
You'll notice something common about all these stories of old people or women who "toss big guys around." The guy who gets tossed is always surprised. If you catch big people off guard you can drop them easily. But it helps a whoooole lot more if you're bigger than them.
1) Massive debt - I thought the President had a hand in the budget, or at least made "requests" that are usually granted. IMO, he should share accountability for the massive debt if he had a hand in setting up the budget.
2) Illegal war - I will concede this point. It was a holdover from the parent's post. However, I think the parent meant to imply that the President lied in order to get Congress to authorize the use of force against Iraq. However, Clinton showed us that the President isn't accountable for lying.
3a) Warrantless wiretaps - If it can be proven? I was under the impression that the President admitted to warrantless wiretaps.
3b) Raping Civil Liberties - Need I say more?
4) Guantanamo - I didn't mention Guantanamo, but I was under the impression that he is involved in the chain of command. You cite the Constitution but this Administration has already shown its disregard for that document with reference to the warrantless wiretaps. While Congress may be accountable, I believe Bush is at least partly responsible.
5) Profiteering - Ha, I notice that you don't try to refute such a claim. You are correct, however, that punishing this Administration's abuse of its power to gain money is nigh impossible.
Sometimes I wonder if anyone has compiled a definitive list of all the ways in which GW has fucked America, sorted into proven, highly probable, possible, improbable, and impossible categories.
Lying under oath about getting a blowjob, or raping civil liberties, massive debt, illegal wars, profiteering, warrantless wiretaps, etc etc.
Regardless, President Bush's activities are illegal, immoral, and unethical.
I wonder if the highly-critical Yee will also be highly-critical of Nintendo's new console name...
I'd say that the opposite is true. You would probably have to spend time teaching the neurons in your brain how to talk to the interface.
So does this mean the young men in question would be True Neutral?
1) The Cell supports a Secure Processing Vault. This is basically hardware-based memory protection; since the OS is software, and software can be compromised, so can the OS. The hardware can't be compromised so easily, so you load up a SPE with some code and data, and then it engages its own memory protection, preventing anyone from reading/writing its memory until it's done, by which time it deletes the important information. So you can't peek at the decrypted results, because they're encrypted when they're loaded, and the decrypted results are deleted when it's done doing its work (which work gets re-encrypted before it leaves the SPE). There's a small communication channel left open, and it's the SPE's duty to protect it.
2) It also has a Runtime Secure Boot. This involves using a cryptographically signed BIOS. This verifies that the BIOS is trusted. From here, any time control is handed over to another program, it first must be cryptographically verified. This prevents unauthorized or compromised code from executing.
3) Once you've securely booted and your SPE is in isolation mode, protected from the eyes of other threads, you have access to The Root Key. The Root Key is stored in hardware, can't be accessed by software, and is used to decrypt other keys. These other keys are then used to do encryption in an individual SPE.
So, we make a key, stick it in some flip flops that you can't read, isolate an SPE to provide memory protection, and then authenticate each and every piece of code from the BIOS through to the currently executing thread. Everything going in is encrypted, isolated when the work is being done, and gets re-encrypted before leaving to the next module, all using encrypted keys. Pretty thick stuff.
Yeah. You certainly don't wanna be the guy who broke the curve. Especially if some of the class knows where you park.
Shit like this pisses me off. Both my high school and my college chose speakers at graduation based on popularity. Both times I had the highest GPA of anyone in the class. I was never allowed to speak at graduation, or say anything.
The only incentive one has for overachieving is success in the workplace, and you might not even see that. And the payment is years of punishment at the hands of your peers.
I never liked my generation, anyway.
Supply and demand would still kick in.
Game gets released, costs too much, only hardcore buy it, sales (=demand) drops, supply remains the same, cost goes down, sales (=demand) goes back up...
I hardly ever buy games when they get released. It's still the same game a month later, and $10 cheaper.
Of course the 360 was too cheap. Look at what they went for on eBay.
Microsoft obviously failed to find the appropriate point on the supply/demand curve for the market.
That page is pretty interesting. Especially the gethuman database
Lots of other comments have made clear the point that it's not easy to program this kind of hardware. Typical software programs run in a very sequential manner. In fact, trying to get cooperative parallel execution of threads is known to be a major sticking point in the average programmer's education.
Hardware, on the other hand, is massively parallel. All the "gates" (*) are all running all the time. It's like multi-threading a program, taken to the limit of infinity. However, if designed correctly, this thing can scale beyond belief, since it's all parallel.
It's also important to note that it's a Virtex4 on that card. That's one hell of an FPGA, they sure aren't cutting any corners. I'm not sure which one they're using, but some Virtex4 chips have PowerPC processors at 450 MHz.
This is definitely a niche product for now, due mainly to the lack of people who can write code in Hardware Description Languages (HDLs). But if you can figure it out, and you have an application that works on a massive scale, this may be for you.
Oh, and for all you detractors who are saying "that thing only runs at 500 MHz! How is it supposed to be faster than my 2 GHz AMD chip?" You're forgetting one very important factor. Your AMD chip executes one instruction at a time, and the important instructions are surrounded by instructions whose sole purpose is to control program flow or move data back and forth. However, the XtremeDSP slices of a Virtex4 can each execute a multiply and an add in a single cycle, and there are up to 512 of them in the most hardcore Virtex4 chip, and other logic executing in parallel can control the "program flow" and ferry data back and forth across the bus.
*: Modern FPGAs are actually built out of SRAMs that can implement arbitrary logic functions. They're no longer arrays of gates, so to speak.
OIC
Haha, it's been so long since I've seen one of those buttons, and with doing that controller project a year ago, the Recency Effect kicked in.
I thought something seemed amiss about that statement...haha
The answer to that is an adjustable rate.
I would venture to say most algorithms are simple. They check to see if the input is occurring faster than humanly possible and if so, ignore it.
However, if you could adjust the rate of rapid fire, and add some small amount of noise to the period of the rate, you could probably fool most rapid fire detection algorithms.
At least, that was the premise when I was building my hack of the DualShock 2 controller.
I will not disagree that the results of such a suggestion would be catastrophic to a significant portion of the exposed population.
There's an old saying, something about omelets and broken eggs.
Once again, I do not support or condone mass irradiation of earth. I merely hypothesize the effects.
Am I the only one interested in the method by which that iClub thing (last link in summary) works?
...
Come on! I wanna know what sensors they put on people and in the clubs, and then I wanna know how they turn the raw data from those sensors into usable data like position in 3d space and orientation.
Is this stuff patented? Patents are public record...
Haha! Reverse patent trolling!
1) Search patent database for good patents
2) Come up with awesome idea using the patent
3) License patent from owner cheaply
4) Release super-awesome product-of-the-century
5)
6) PROFIT!
Not everyone will use the same tag. Thus you get to come up with an (average) percentage of confidence. Then you can cross-correlate this against some words that occur in all the given samples, and have some sort of confidence metric about your measurement.
From here, you might be surprised at the different kinds of trends you might find. A spike in the number of people who happen to be excited about the latest fansub of Naruto, for instance. Hm, I bet that means that episode is good.
You might also be able to do longitudinal studies of the information, based on mood with respect to a specific event. Say, Katrina.
This is ENTIRELY hypothetical...
But say we take, I dunno, the whole planet...and just douse it in some radiation. Just enough to cause a variety of small, minor mutations in a very large (or the entire) population.
1) Any ones that result in sterility are gone, end of story...
2) Lots of small minor mutations is more like tickling the DNA, whereas massive exposure and major mutations is more like kicking it. This results in a greater survival ratio.
Transiently accelerate evolution, yanno? Maybe the dinosaurs didn't all die off, but collectively evolved one day when the magnetic poles flipped, dropping the protection from the Sun's radiation, and everyone was exposed to just a bit too much radiation. *shrugs*
Regardless, I think it's almost dishonorable not to study the effect radiation had on nature. Those poor cells are suffering, aren't they? Don't make them suffer for nothing.
Preface: My Senior project for college was reverse engineering the DualShock2 communication protocol and adding major modifications and upgrades, like adjustable rapid-fire, real-time macros, completely reconfigurable buttons, and some rudimentary motion sensitivity.
Let me attest that it is VERY hard to get motion sensitivity right. I was using a 2-axis 2g accelerometer to try measuring gravity, and mapping the orientation of the controller with respect to the gravity vector onto the left analog stick's horizontal axis.
I tried for a good three weeks, attempting to perfect an algorithm for smooth playback. In the end, I couldn't get something that worked universally for all games. It turns out that the DualShock2's analog sticks are pathetic. They jitter around their "center value", and I use that term lightly because "center" could be anywhere from 0x70 to 0x90. Meanwhile, a Mad Catz controller returned 0x7F dead on every time.
So part of the problem is building a reliable interface. I think this is why Nintendo is rumored to use several different sensors. I've heard stuff about IR, ultrasonic, gyros, accelerometers, etc.
Now, if the response of these sensors is very well understood and presented to developers in an intuitive manner, and they're consistent, then this could take off. But those are the biggest issues: getting consistent, reliable information from the sensors, and effectively decoding that information into game inputs.
Not only does SSE3 have those hardware thread sync instructions (which I thought were mainly for HyperThreading) but the other math instructions are supposed to be helpful for complex numbers.
SSE3 isn't exactly new, either...it's been around since Prescott (about two years as of now).
I recall that Intel's internal data paths were 64-bits wide, which meant SSE's 128 bit operations were actually hacks. I'm not sure if AMD had a similar hack, or if they included real 128-bit data paths. I know Merom/Core/NGMA is supposed to have true 128-bit data paths, so SSE will be even better.
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/core.a
Note the difference in code names. Processors based off the Core microarchitecture were codenamed Merom. However, processors based off of dual-core Pentium M's were codenamed Yonah.
What information do you really have? Steve Jones. Fairly generic American names. My wager is, if you were really that interested, you could narrow it down to a few people. But there has to be more than one guy with such a generic name who is 39 years old and married with two kids. Knowing the /. crowd, though, someone's going to go googling, find this guy's home address and telephone number, and post it in a comment.
It might end up that those aren't even his real names, and just a pseudonym. Such is the price of infamy.