Yeah, that quote was from Rumsfeld. I figured he wouldn't mind.:P
My point is, the fact that we haven't found anything yet, and that the weapons inspectors found nothing, doesn't mean anything. Obviously these things were so well hidden that we should not expect to be finding them.
Case in point -- A couple weeks ago, an Iraqi scientist turned over a bunch of nuke parts and documents to the US army. These were all left over from Iraq's nuclear weapons program. He said Saddam had ordered him to keep them hidden until some later point, at which they would presumably be used to re-start the program. He had these things hidden in an oil drum, buried in his back yard under a rose bush.
How would we ever find that? We can't go around digging up every square inch of the country looking for weapons! And, no, we can't just expect these people to come forward -- the guy who did had to leave the country and take his whole family with him because he feared Saddam's henchmen would come get them otherwise (after he told).
Why would Saddam kick out the weapon inspectors several years ago if there were no WMD's? Why did he consistently try to hinder their efforts as much as he could? Why did Iraqi scientists refuse to be interviewed unless an Iraqi government rep was present (to insure that they didn't spill the beans)? I think they had WMD's, but I don't think we'll ever find them. (Obviously we already have proof that they were planning on making nukes, which should be good enough anyway...)
Regardless, this is all irrelevant. Most of the Iraqi people were happy to see Saddam removed. The WMD thing was just an excuse, because if Bush had gone into the UN and said "We have to liberate Iraq from tyranny", he would have just looked like an arrogant ass, even though that's exactly what we did.
Not that I like Bush. Obviously he fucked up the whole "diplomacy" thing.
Hey, you're right. I'm happy to see that -- makes my life easier.:) Too bad it's only the 9800, though. Also, still doesn't seem to support branching... although I may just be reading the spec wrong. These damned GL specs are always so poorly written.:P
The cards are nearly identical in speed. In fact, benchmarks done by others (like Tom's Hardware and Anandtech) seem to show the FX5900 edging the Radeon in most tests. (You may be thinking of the 5800, which was, indeed, slower than the Radeon.)
The FX5900's that you have seen benchmarked are all running at 450/850. The eVGA version of the FX5900 is clocked at 500/900, which is possible because they put 2ns VRAM on their card. Naturally, this means a 5%-10% performance boost, allowing it to edge out the Radeon in more tests.
The best GeForce FX and the best Radeon cost the same at $500 (last I checked, about two weeks ago).
The FX 5900 allows far more complex vertex and pixel shaders. Pixel shaders can be 1024 instructions long and may include branches. I think the Radeon's limit is, like, 16 or 32 instructions, with no branches, but don't quote me on that.
The FX 5900 runs Doom 3 much faster. I know this isn't relevant now but it's an interesting point. Current games are going to run unbelievably fast on either card, but future games will run faster on the FX 5900.
The GeForce FX 5900 fan is not loud. The infamous "dust buster" fan was on the 5800. The 5900 uses a more traditional fan. The only time you can even hear it is when you open a game, and it's really not loud at all. I don't even notice it unless I'm listening for it (yes, I own one).
There really is no clear winner between these two, and they cost the same. So why wouldn't people buy the FX? I prefer to support NVidia because they brought about all the recent great leaps in graphics technology (programmable vertex and pixel shaders, Cg, etc.) whereas ATI hasn't come up with anything particularily impressive.
NVidia is not 3dfx. Don't expect them to die anytime soon.
(I am a professional game programmer. Just thought I'd mention that.)
Studies show that computer-illiterate people are easily confused by multiple buttons. You'd be surprised, but it really is a problem. The concept of "left-click" and "right-click" seems intuitive to us... but some people really can't grasp it. So, Apple makes their OS able to cater to these people, while at the same time supporting multiple-button mice for power users. They include a single-button mouse in the box because the people who need it aren't going to be able to buy their own mouse. You, on the other hand, no doubt would have no trouble buying a mouse with as many buttons as you want.
This probably all sounds absurd to you. It sounds pretty silly to me, too... I mean, how dumb would one have to be to not understand a two-button mouse? However, Apple is the one who has spent millions of dollars researching it, so I think I'll trust their judgement.
If you have the money for a Mac, you can probably afford any mouse you want to go with it. Personally, I've been using my trusty IntelliMouse Explorer for something like five years now, and I don't intend to give it up until someone pries it out of my cold, dead hands!
Also, Bobo the gorilla announced today that he is filing suit against mankind for infringing upon his patent on "A method of heating carbon-based molecules to cause combustion and generate energy." Bobo says that his ancestors filed the patent with the USPTO around the year one million BC, but the patent was not actually granted until 1998.
Actually, it's a little-known fact that OSX already supports three-button mice! It's sort of tricky to enable, though. If you want to use a three-button mouse (complete with right-click context menus like you'd expect), you'll need to follow the following steps:
(1) Plug in a 3-button USB mouse.
I know this procedure may be a little confusing compared to the simple config file edits and driver installations you might be used to in other OS's, but if you follow the steps carefully, you should be able to figure it out. Have fun!
*sigh* Yes, in the ultra-new beta version. That's not what the original poster was saying. He was saying that this isn't news, and that because the two services use the same protocol, they must already be bridged... which is obviously false, because they have been using the same protocol for years but they only just started allowing communications between them now.
Damnit. I must remind myself never to read any post not modded "funny". I invariably find something that is blatantly wrong or stupid that I can't help but argue with. Then I waste all this time writing about it and replying to all the replies (most of which are also blatantly wrong or otherwise miss my point). I could be spending all of this time coding!
I assert that you are incorrect. The networks are not "bridged" unless you can send a message from an ICQ user to an AIM user and vice versa.
If you can post, in reply to this, specific instructions on how to send IM's between the two networks, you win the duel, and the moderators are instructed to mod me down to -1. On the other hand, if you cannot produce said instructions (thus indicating that you are wrong), the moderators shall mod you down to -1.
AVAILABILITY
The poll() systemcall was introduced in Linux 2.1.23. The poll()
library call was introduced in libc 5.4.28 (and provides emulation
using select if your kernel does not have a poll syscall).
Take a look at the select(2) system call. It seems to serve a useful purpose: it allows a single program thread to wait for activity on multiple network connections at once.
Back when select() was created, a process could only have 32 connections open at a time, maximum. So, the guy who invented the call decided that the caller could use 32-bit integers to represent lists of connections. You just set the bits corresponding to the connection numbers you want to watch and leave the other bits as zero. Then, the system alters the list in-place before it returns to indicate which connections are active.
Well, now adays, a program can have a few more than 32 connections open. However, for standards' sake, select() still uses bit fields. In Linux, these bit fields are something like 8k in size. Since they are altered in place when you call select(), you have to set them up fresh every time you call it. Then, the OS has to scan through them all and set up each connection for waiting. This is *slow*.
Much better methods of waiting on multiple connections have been developed. The best methods involve an event queue. You then tell each connection you want to watch to always place an event on the queue when it receives data. This way, the OS doesn't have to set up every connection all over again every single time you wait for activity. FreeBSD has an interface for this called "kernel queues" which is quite nice. Windows has all sorts of convoluted interfaces for it. Linux only just recently came up with a semi-decent interface called "epoll", but it is rather limited in some ways. In any case, all of these interfaces are different.
Unfortunately, select() has stuck because it is a standard. People use it because it works everywhere. It works everywhere because people use it. However, it is, IMO, one of the worst system calls I've ever soon.
This is why my basic opinion on standards is, "Standards are great as long as they don't suck!"
Puns would trip up a system which had language parsing and interpretation hard-coded. I think an AI which learned language itself (using general learning algorithms which aren't designed around language processing) would likely be able to catch puns... especially if it learned like a human, in that it learned spoken language first, and later learned to read by translating the words into spoken words in its head.
In any case, my algorithm would be able to do it.;) Now if only I had a fast enough computer...
No... no it wouldn't. AI would not have emotions like we do unless we programmed it to be that way. Personally, I would never program an AI with human-like emotions.
AI would not get bored. That is a human trait. AI will continue working on the goal given to it forever.
AI would not do something inexplicable "for its mere entertainment". AI would only be "entertained" by the things which it was programmed to enjoy. If it were programmed to enjoy helping humans, that is all it would ever want to do.
Think of AI as a combination of a purely logical reasoning system and a goal. That is, you have a system which can answer questions based on some sort of knowledge. It doesn't have desires or feelings of any sort. You just tell it things and ask questions, and it answers the questions as well as it can. Then, you add another component which continuously asks the question "If I want to [insert goal here], what should I do now?". Then, the AI does whatever the reasoning system answers.
Human emotions are just a very complicated system of goals developed by evolution. We could perhaps program an AI to emulate them, but doing so would not be beneficial. Humans are selfish. We want AI to serve us. So, we give it that goal -- do whatever will make humans happy.
Let's see AI do something it wasn't originally designed to do because it wants to.
This is sort of a tangent, but how would an AI decide what it "wants to" do? How do we decide what we "want to" do? We are given goals and desires by instinct, really. But, you can't logically derive what is right or wrong, or what is desirable or not. Thus, the creator of the AI has to give it a goal, and it is exactly that which the AI will "want to" do.
This is a mistake humans seem to make a lot. We seem to expect that AI will have desires similar to our own. People think that AI will naturally seek to "advance" itself or become more powerful. In fact, if we just program it with the desire of helping us, it will be quite happy to spend all of its incredible intelligence and power making us happy.
On a side note, I don't believe that an AI has to be exactly like us to qualify as "true intelligence". It just has to be able to solve arbitrary problems with a certain level of skill.
Slashdot Mirror
So, if they had them, but weren't prepared to use them, that would be ok? Obviously that statement by Blair was wrong, but that's beside the point.
Yeah, that quote was from Rumsfeld. I figured he wouldn't mind. :P
My point is, the fact that we haven't found anything yet, and that the weapons inspectors found nothing, doesn't mean anything. Obviously these things were so well hidden that we should not expect to be finding them.
Case in point -- A couple weeks ago, an Iraqi scientist turned over a bunch of nuke parts and documents to the US army. These were all left over from Iraq's nuclear weapons program. He said Saddam had ordered him to keep them hidden until some later point, at which they would presumably be used to re-start the program. He had these things hidden in an oil drum, buried in his back yard under a rose bush.
How would we ever find that? We can't go around digging up every square inch of the country looking for weapons! And, no, we can't just expect these people to come forward -- the guy who did had to leave the country and take his whole family with him because he feared Saddam's henchmen would come get them otherwise (after he told).
Why would Saddam kick out the weapon inspectors several years ago if there were no WMD's? Why did he consistently try to hinder their efforts as much as he could? Why did Iraqi scientists refuse to be interviewed unless an Iraqi government rep was present (to insure that they didn't spill the beans)? I think they had WMD's, but I don't think we'll ever find them. (Obviously we already have proof that they were planning on making nukes, which should be good enough anyway...)
Regardless, this is all irrelevant. Most of the Iraqi people were happy to see Saddam removed. The WMD thing was just an excuse, because if Bush had gone into the UN and said "We have to liberate Iraq from tyranny", he would have just looked like an arrogant ass, even though that's exactly what we did.
Not that I like Bush. Obviously he fucked up the whole "diplomacy" thing.
...they didn't find any evidence of WMD's.
They haven't found Saddam Hussein yet either, but no one says he didn't exist.
1998 called. They want their joke back.
Yeah, Microsoft might get upset if they knew you were selling pirated copies of Windows 2000.
Hey, you're right. I'm happy to see that -- makes my life easier. :) Too bad it's only the 9800, though. Also, still doesn't seem to support branching... although I may just be reading the spec wrong. These damned GL specs are always so poorly written. :P
There really is no clear winner between these two, and they cost the same. So why wouldn't people buy the FX? I prefer to support NVidia because they brought about all the recent great leaps in graphics technology (programmable vertex and pixel shaders, Cg, etc.) whereas ATI hasn't come up with anything particularily impressive.
NVidia is not 3dfx. Don't expect them to die anytime soon.
(I am a professional game programmer. Just thought I'd mention that.)
But... that's exactly what it is!
Have you ever opened a G4 box? It's... beautiful.
Studies show that computer-illiterate people are easily confused by multiple buttons. You'd be surprised, but it really is a problem. The concept of "left-click" and "right-click" seems intuitive to us... but some people really can't grasp it. So, Apple makes their OS able to cater to these people, while at the same time supporting multiple-button mice for power users. They include a single-button mouse in the box because the people who need it aren't going to be able to buy their own mouse. You, on the other hand, no doubt would have no trouble buying a mouse with as many buttons as you want.
This probably all sounds absurd to you. It sounds pretty silly to me, too... I mean, how dumb would one have to be to not understand a two-button mouse? However, Apple is the one who has spent millions of dollars researching it, so I think I'll trust their judgement.
If you have the money for a Mac, you can probably afford any mouse you want to go with it. Personally, I've been using my trusty IntelliMouse Explorer for something like five years now, and I don't intend to give it up until someone pries it out of my cold, dead hands!
Also, Bobo the gorilla announced today that he is filing suit against mankind for infringing upon his patent on "A method of heating carbon-based molecules to cause combustion and generate energy." Bobo says that his ancestors filed the patent with the USPTO around the year one million BC, but the patent was not actually granted until 1998.
Actually, it's a little-known fact that OSX already supports three-button mice! It's sort of tricky to enable, though. If you want to use a three-button mouse (complete with right-click context menus like you'd expect), you'll need to follow the following steps:
(1) Plug in a 3-button USB mouse.
I know this procedure may be a little confusing compared to the simple config file edits and driver installations you might be used to in other OS's, but if you follow the steps carefully, you should be able to figure it out. Have fun!
Well then, I guess I lose.
*sigh* Yes, in the ultra-new beta version. That's not what the original poster was saying. He was saying that this isn't news, and that because the two services use the same protocol, they must already be bridged... which is obviously false, because they have been using the same protocol for years but they only just started allowing communications between them now.
Damnit. I must remind myself never to read any post not modded "funny". I invariably find something that is blatantly wrong or stupid that I can't help but argue with. Then I waste all this time writing about it and replying to all the replies (most of which are also blatantly wrong or otherwise miss my point). I could be spending all of this time coding!
It doesn't work with the official Windows AIM client, either.
I challenge you to a karma duel.
I assert that you are incorrect. The networks are not "bridged" unless you can send a message from an ICQ user to an AIM user and vice versa.
If you can post, in reply to this, specific instructions on how to send IM's between the two networks, you win the duel, and the moderators are instructed to mod me down to -1. On the other hand, if you cannot produce said instructions (thus indicating that you are wrong), the moderators shall mod you down to -1.
Err... I don't think it is. From the man page:
CONFORMING TO
XPG4-UNIX.
AVAILABILITY
The poll() systemcall was introduced in Linux 2.1.23. The poll()
library call was introduced in libc 5.4.28 (and provides emulation
using select if your kernel does not have a poll syscall).
Only 128? On my last Linux machine, the structure was several kilobytes in size (in order to have enough bits for every possible FD).
I know about poll. It's not much better, and it's not even standard. :P
Take a look at the select(2) system call. It seems to serve a useful purpose: it allows a single program thread to wait for activity on multiple network connections at once.
Back when select() was created, a process could only have 32 connections open at a time, maximum. So, the guy who invented the call decided that the caller could use 32-bit integers to represent lists of connections. You just set the bits corresponding to the connection numbers you want to watch and leave the other bits as zero. Then, the system alters the list in-place before it returns to indicate which connections are active.
Well, now adays, a program can have a few more than 32 connections open. However, for standards' sake, select() still uses bit fields. In Linux, these bit fields are something like 8k in size. Since they are altered in place when you call select(), you have to set them up fresh every time you call it. Then, the OS has to scan through them all and set up each connection for waiting. This is *slow*.
Much better methods of waiting on multiple connections have been developed. The best methods involve an event queue. You then tell each connection you want to watch to always place an event on the queue when it receives data. This way, the OS doesn't have to set up every connection all over again every single time you wait for activity. FreeBSD has an interface for this called "kernel queues" which is quite nice. Windows has all sorts of convoluted interfaces for it. Linux only just recently came up with a semi-decent interface called "epoll", but it is rather limited in some ways. In any case, all of these interfaces are different.
Unfortunately, select() has stuck because it is a standard. People use it because it works everywhere. It works everywhere because people use it. However, it is, IMO, one of the worst system calls I've ever soon.
This is why my basic opinion on standards is, "Standards are great as long as they don't suck!"
My Win2k box plays games reliably and maintains more than a few months of uptime.
Please refer to this post for more information.
Thank you.
Puns would trip up a system which had language parsing and interpretation hard-coded. I think an AI which learned language itself (using general learning algorithms which aren't designed around language processing) would likely be able to catch puns... especially if it learned like a human, in that it learned spoken language first, and later learned to read by translating the words into spoken words in its head.
;) Now if only I had a fast enough computer...
In any case, my algorithm would be able to do it.
No... no it wouldn't. AI would not have emotions like we do unless we programmed it to be that way. Personally, I would never program an AI with human-like emotions.
AI would not get bored. That is a human trait. AI will continue working on the goal given to it forever.
AI would not do something inexplicable "for its mere entertainment". AI would only be "entertained" by the things which it was programmed to enjoy. If it were programmed to enjoy helping humans, that is all it would ever want to do.
Think of AI as a combination of a purely logical reasoning system and a goal. That is, you have a system which can answer questions based on some sort of knowledge. It doesn't have desires or feelings of any sort. You just tell it things and ask questions, and it answers the questions as well as it can. Then, you add another component which continuously asks the question "If I want to [insert goal here], what should I do now?". Then, the AI does whatever the reasoning system answers.
Human emotions are just a very complicated system of goals developed by evolution. We could perhaps program an AI to emulate them, but doing so would not be beneficial. Humans are selfish. We want AI to serve us. So, we give it that goal -- do whatever will make humans happy.
Let's see AI do something it wasn't originally designed to do because it wants to.
This is sort of a tangent, but how would an AI decide what it "wants to" do? How do we decide what we "want to" do? We are given goals and desires by instinct, really. But, you can't logically derive what is right or wrong, or what is desirable or not. Thus, the creator of the AI has to give it a goal, and it is exactly that which the AI will "want to" do.
This is a mistake humans seem to make a lot. We seem to expect that AI will have desires similar to our own. People think that AI will naturally seek to "advance" itself or become more powerful. In fact, if we just program it with the desire of helping us, it will be quite happy to spend all of its incredible intelligence and power making us happy.
On a side note, I don't believe that an AI has to be exactly like us to qualify as "true intelligence". It just has to be able to solve arbitrary problems with a certain level of skill.
It's ok for you to download them. It's not ok for you to share them.
I assume they did searches for titles that they own, and sent the message to anyone sharing them.