Unfortunately, that will only be the case if you happen to have a very large number of cubes in the same configuration, because the calculation to get the 25 moves for each configuration is extremely time consuming. Presumably the storage requirements for the solution of every configuration is prohibitive.
>>It's a religion; therefore, I guarantee it isn't accurate. >Until you can answer the question of what was there before the big bang, and what was there before that, and what was there before that, ad infinitum, that is a debatable statement.
Not really. Every 'religion' I'm aware of makes claims that are factually inaccurate. The god-of-the-gaps is most certainly not the god in the bible, to koran, the torah, or the secret tomes of Lron. Nor is Spinoza's god. It's really just the last retreat of reluctant pseudo-agnostics.
Not to contest the power of those numbers, but I'm curious how many people were found to have drugs on them when caught for another crime such as robbery, and it was easier to nail them for the drugs than anything else.
But yeah, ridiculous.
The other thing I wonder is why those 60% of prisoners couldn't just decide not to do drugs? I've never had any trouble not doing drugs. Am I that strange?
There's also the sad fact that there are a number of scientists who have a stroke of what they assume is brilliance and ignore the inadequacies of their theory and any contradictory evidence. The momentum of scientific thought, as much as it hurts revolution, also protects science from a lot of inane BS.
That's not to say I think either side is right or wrong. But we shouldn't assume that the underdog is right *just because* he's fighting the establishment.
"To be a persecuted genius, you not only have to be persecuted; you also have to be right." (Asimov)
Really, more to the point, life is a tremendous waste of time if you're not learning about the world in which you live. As one of many people interested in the subject matter, I want the government to fund more science of all kinds, especially in space and biology. It's damaging to require science to have immediate payoffs. You're simply hitting nearby targets. Funding all science for the sake of knowledge EXPOSES more targets, letting us know the possibilities. THEN we can let the free market work on commercializing the discoveries. We'll get much farther that way.
So you wear rose colored glasses only when looking to the past, eh? I don't see how anything has changed, just that they're embracing and extending evil things (drm) just like everything else. They've never been any better for the software industry as a whole.
The best argument FOR their tactics, (and I think this is a more favorable analysis than they deserve,) is that they tend to buy up the front-runner in any competition when the software is 75% good enough and shut out competition by putting their OS behind it, which moves the industry overall forward without wasting time perfecting things. Any good company has to balance fixing the non-stopper bugs with new development, and MS has been a driving force for that in the industry as a whole. Now, I think in reality their methodology has been focused on maintaining their hold by pushing competition out instead of driving it forward. Anything other than being king and owning the industry was accidental.
The real shame is that they could have really been the father figure of software that I suspect Bill thinks himself to be. Open standards and giving back to the community would have made people appreciate MS's presence and would have expanded the market significantly, which would likely also have given MS a larger field to develop upon, instead of prey upon. But that's certainly more far-sighted than most people are I suppose, and Bill above all has been a guru of nasty business tactics rather than a visionary.
(geez, I meant to type a sentance... I need to learn how not to rant on the internet)
Space elevator. You ride out past the mid-point, and let go when your trajectory will hit the moon. I don't think it's unreasonable that we'll at least start on it in the next 50 years.:)
Well, if he wants to refer back to 1 book a day on average, which 10% of his collection should he keep? Most of the books are in his and his wifes interest areas, or they wouldn't have them. The maintenance per book is probably less over ten years than the time it'd take to hunt it down outside of the house.
And for the record, they DID sell off or donate 500 books.
Anyway, many libraries have to throw out books because THEY don't have the space.
My google-fu is weak today, so I can't provide you references, but generally when given sets of contradictory conclusions where all sound obvious, people have no better chance than random than picking the correct 'obvious' conclusion.
There's also a matter of to what degree the effect occurs.
I've yet to see any evidence that either he or almost any publicly religious official actually hold the beliefs they state.
It's not really any wonder that politicians love a block of voters that believe anything you say because you say you believe a book. Or in Jack's case, audience attention that gets him paid air time on major news networks.
That's not the argument he was making, I think. Rather, that people ARE filling them with songs they DIDN'T buy from iTunes. The last two words in the previous sentence are superfluous.
Yeees, it would be difficult for any single person or even a very small team to reproduce most of the multi-million dollar games we get to play all the time.
It seems to me that the challenges of accounting for latency on each client, and accounting for latency on the server are not that different. The design for the model is significant in *allowing* you to move it to the server.
I remember the duke nukem 3d demo was particularly bad about handling latency. It would let you move during lag while the other players stood still, and when you shot them in the face with a rocket, it told their clients they'd been shot, rather than that the shot had been fired, so when the lagger sync'd in, all of a sudden someone would randomly explode. They fixed that in a patch before the game was even released. I've read articles on ideas for path prediction and annealing simulations to reality. It's not a problem that can be completely solved, but it's already being done in games we play.
Hell, WoW apparently DOES do a lot of what's described, at least to me it seems evident from the interesting lag behavior such as bizarre shot paths that should go straight but get bent to head to where the monster actually was on the server. One of the problems is that they don't seem to have been entirely consistent, or a lot of the exploits wouldn't work. And at that point, the argument of "it's hard" is like bitching about it being impossible to stop inserting buffer overflows - get a better design process and actually put resources on fixing the problem.
The entire point being that latency is clearly a problem when the client does the calculations, but it has some useful but not complete solutions on a client and they're no different when the server's handling it. And to the point of the post that started this, if all the calculations are handled on the server, then you don't have to put warden, VAC2, etc on the client computer and pray that the bad guys haven't come up with a way to circumvent it, and that you catch it, and can track them to a real account to ban them. And think how much time you'd save not having to try to keep up with thousands of people that want to cheat!
I don't agree that latency matters any which way, especially if you don't start with the assumption that it would be done wrong. The thread began with a mention of allowing the clients to do whatever projection would work. Half a second ago the server knew player A was heading toward the corner, and told you where he'd be when you could expect to get the packet, and 5 ms ago it told him that last it heard, half a second ago you were going to be at the corner now. You fire and hit the simulation of A, which the server can verify, so the server tells player A he done been shot. The server has to have some rules for how to settle some cases, but a happy intermediate can be decided. And frankly, at 500 ms, you're kinda boned anyway, sorry.
But it doesn't matter where the calculation is. The time at which information is available to each party doesn't change, and the server at least can come to a reasonable decision between the players. And the since the players are most likely not colluding, the server can lie to them both to make things seem consistent.
That's still irrelevant to the point, because the client can simulate as if its request was accepted. As long as the server can retroactively accept that the client did something half a second ago, and the client can verify that the server OK'd its transaction half a second ago that was sent one second ago, everything'll work. There's nothing stopping the client using every trick in the book, the entire point is the server not treating it as gospel, which is the same as 'verifying' the client. Verifying good!
WoW actually uses line of sight with terrain, so it's still not terribly kind in that regard to processing power.
(writing quickly, gotta run, sorry for errors or brevity)
In hindsight, I'm suspicious that there's been some misinformation about the specifics of the lawsuit.
If J.K. Rowling is suing over the lexicon's use of her characters and excerpts from her book, then it's a work of research and should be protected.
If, however, and I think this is reasonably the case, Rowling is suing over the lexicon publisher's refusal to remove her contribution to the website that was ostensibly free to the community but has been illegitimately co-opted (with or without a theoretical click-through I know nothing about, I was just hypothesizing), then they're changing a publishing agreement and Rowling's case is a lot stronger.
I don't know which is the case, but I'm now leaning towards J.K. being in the right.
First, a little clarification - I think I implied things that I didn't mean to. I don't know if there was a click-through license at all. I've just read secondhand that Rowling contributed to the site, and there was or was not such a thing. I'm presuming that the site's hosts had this plan all along, or at least for quite a while, and thus would try to cover their asses. Since I wasn't trying to make a point about click-throughs I just assumed the worst case. If there wasn't, Rowling can claim they're using her contribution to the site without her permission. If there was, it probably wouldn't hold up and Rowling can still make the same claim. However, the court case the article is talking about originally didn't seem to be about this matter.
In writing this post however, I'm really suspicion that the news posted about it so far is actually way off the mark. Everyone's talking about Rowling suing about the use of her books and her characters, but it might actually be the case that she's suing over the lexicon publisher's refusal to redact her contributions made to an ostensibly free site for the fans. If that's actually the case then my position takes a 180 and Rowling's in the right. If.
Latency isn't a problem with the GP's point - the game model can be designed to make it a non-issue. In fact it's not terribly harder than the way it's done now.
The GP's idea is merely that instead of grabbing a powerup and saying "I now have 100 health!", the client can only say "I move forward" and the server determines that he ran into the powerup, how much health he starts with, and how much he gets, and then tells the client "you have 98 health!".
The REAL problem for MMOs that I see is server processing power - One server with ten thousand clients doing all the physics calculations is a lot cheaper than one server doing the physics calculations for ten thousand clients.
It's kinda sad that she's disillusioned, but she's within her rights to sue. Now it's for the courts to decide.
Unfortunately for her case, the Lexicon is a work of research, which IS protected by copyright law. They can talk about the characters, analyze plot, create timelines of the stories, and excerpt text from the books all day long, and they're doing original research. This is what copyright law is for! She seems to have an inflated idea of the rights that copyright gives her, which is NOT a blanket of control over everything containing the words 'Harry Potter'.
Now, the site owners might be total sleaze-buckets and started a site with the covert intention of selling the work of the community, but then the failure was that of the community to post on a site where the (I'm assuming, I have no idea if this is the case) user account agreement claimed that all postings are the property of the site owner. If the site didn't have that, then everyone that ever posted can say they don't want their work used, and they'd have to take it out.
But then, anyone can sue for any reason. It, again, is for the courts to decide whether their claim is legitimate.
The lexicon would be a work of research, i.e. cataloging spells, creating a timeline. That kind of work is explicitly protected in copyright law, while a story (ab)using the characters owned by her is not. It's just not the same thing, she's just bitter because her mistaken take on copyright law, like so many people, leads her to believe that she has complete control over everything with the words 'Harry Potter' on it.
What she plans to do with her money (charity, hookers, whatever) doesn't make a bit of difference, and doesn't oblige the publishers of the lexicon in any way.
The one thing the publishers can't claim is that theirs is official or endorsed. That alone gives Rowling plenty enough of a head-start for her own encyclopedia potter, along with her ability to add details to the world that don't already exist. The lexicon can't do that, or else it loses some validity of its claim to be research if it doesn't extrapolate from known facts (The books, things Rowling's said publicly already).
Now Rowling's best case is probably that she contributed to the website and now her work is going to be used for profit that she doesn't want it to be. Any tacit click-through agreement saying the works contributed belong to the publisher probably won't hold up in court, and it's a valid complaint on J.K's part - but they only need to excise her contributions and continue on a bit unofficially less endorsed.
Really that's the sleaziest thing the lexicon's trying to do IMO and it has proper recourse. The courts should toss J.K. out on her ass for the case that she's actually bringing.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, that will only be the case if you happen to have a very large number of cubes in the same configuration, because the calculation to get the 25 moves for each configuration is extremely time consuming. Presumably the storage requirements for the solution of every configuration is prohibitive.
Alternatively, your post goes to show how easily people believe the television when it tells them what to fear. :)
>>It's a religion; therefore, I guarantee it isn't accurate.
>Until you can answer the question of what was there before the big bang, and what was there before that, and what was there before that, ad infinitum, that is a debatable statement.
Not really. Every 'religion' I'm aware of makes claims that are factually inaccurate. The god-of-the-gaps is most certainly not the god in the bible, to koran, the torah, or the secret tomes of Lron. Nor is Spinoza's god. It's really just the last retreat of reluctant pseudo-agnostics.
I find the implication that marijuana is bad because it's a gateway to alcohol and tobacco HILARIOUS.
Not to contest the power of those numbers, but I'm curious how many people were found to have drugs on them when caught for another crime such as robbery, and it was easier to nail them for the drugs than anything else.
But yeah, ridiculous.
The other thing I wonder is why those 60% of prisoners couldn't just decide not to do drugs? I've never had any trouble not doing drugs. Am I that strange?
There's also the sad fact that there are a number of scientists who have a stroke of what they assume is brilliance and ignore the inadequacies of their theory and any contradictory evidence. The momentum of scientific thought, as much as it hurts revolution, also protects science from a lot of inane BS.
That's not to say I think either side is right or wrong. But we shouldn't assume that the underdog is right *just because* he's fighting the establishment.
"To be a persecuted genius, you not only have to be persecuted; you also have to be right." (Asimov)
Really, more to the point, life is a tremendous waste of time if you're not learning about the world in which you live. As one of many people interested in the subject matter, I want the government to fund more science of all kinds, especially in space and biology. It's damaging to require science to have immediate payoffs. You're simply hitting nearby targets. Funding all science for the sake of knowledge EXPOSES more targets, letting us know the possibilities. THEN we can let the free market work on commercializing the discoveries. We'll get much farther that way.
Nor do those sciences need 0.5%.
So you wear rose colored glasses only when looking to the past, eh? I don't see how anything has changed, just that they're embracing and extending evil things (drm) just like everything else. They've never been any better for the software industry as a whole.
The best argument FOR their tactics, (and I think this is a more favorable analysis than they deserve,) is that they tend to buy up the front-runner in any competition when the software is 75% good enough and shut out competition by putting their OS behind it, which moves the industry overall forward without wasting time perfecting things. Any good company has to balance fixing the non-stopper bugs with new development, and MS has been a driving force for that in the industry as a whole. Now, I think in reality their methodology has been focused on maintaining their hold by pushing competition out instead of driving it forward. Anything other than being king and owning the industry was accidental.
The real shame is that they could have really been the father figure of software that I suspect Bill thinks himself to be. Open standards and giving back to the community would have made people appreciate MS's presence and would have expanded the market significantly, which would likely also have given MS a larger field to develop upon, instead of prey upon. But that's certainly more far-sighted than most people are I suppose, and Bill above all has been a guru of nasty business tactics rather than a visionary.
(geez, I meant to type a sentance... I need to learn how not to rant on the internet)
Space elevator. You ride out past the mid-point, and let go when your trajectory will hit the moon. I don't think it's unreasonable that we'll at least start on it in the next 50 years. :)
Well, if he wants to refer back to 1 book a day on average, which 10% of his collection should he keep? Most of the books are in his and his wifes interest areas, or they wouldn't have them. The maintenance per book is probably less over ten years than the time it'd take to hunt it down outside of the house.
And for the record, they DID sell off or donate 500 books.
Anyway, many libraries have to throw out books because THEY don't have the space.
My google-fu is weak today, so I can't provide you references, but generally when given sets of contradictory conclusions where all sound obvious, people have no better chance than random than picking the correct 'obvious' conclusion.
There's also a matter of to what degree the effect occurs.
I've yet to see any evidence that either he or almost any publicly religious official actually hold the beliefs they state.
It's not really any wonder that politicians love a block of voters that believe anything you say because you say you believe a book. Or in Jack's case, audience attention that gets him paid air time on major news networks.
An example:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/11/mysterious_case_of_ethical_myo.php
Upon review, his post sounds that way out of context of the thread. In context, I'm not so sure.
That's not the argument he was making, I think. Rather, that people ARE filling them with songs they DIDN'T buy from iTunes. The last two words in the previous sentence are superfluous.
Yeees, it would be difficult for any single person or even a very small team to reproduce most of the multi-million dollar games we get to play all the time.
It seems to me that the challenges of accounting for latency on each client, and accounting for latency on the server are not that different. The design for the model is significant in *allowing* you to move it to the server.
I remember the duke nukem 3d demo was particularly bad about handling latency. It would let you move during lag while the other players stood still, and when you shot them in the face with a rocket, it told their clients they'd been shot, rather than that the shot had been fired, so when the lagger sync'd in, all of a sudden someone would randomly explode. They fixed that in a patch before the game was even released. I've read articles on ideas for path prediction and annealing simulations to reality. It's not a problem that can be completely solved, but it's already being done in games we play.
Hell, WoW apparently DOES do a lot of what's described, at least to me it seems evident from the interesting lag behavior such as bizarre shot paths that should go straight but get bent to head to where the monster actually was on the server. One of the problems is that they don't seem to have been entirely consistent, or a lot of the exploits wouldn't work. And at that point, the argument of "it's hard" is like bitching about it being impossible to stop inserting buffer overflows - get a better design process and actually put resources on fixing the problem.
The entire point being that latency is clearly a problem when the client does the calculations, but it has some useful but not complete solutions on a client and they're no different when the server's handling it. And to the point of the post that started this, if all the calculations are handled on the server, then you don't have to put warden, VAC2, etc on the client computer and pray that the bad guys haven't come up with a way to circumvent it, and that you catch it, and can track them to a real account to ban them. And think how much time you'd save not having to try to keep up with thousands of people that want to cheat!
Sorry to hear that Alaska is (online) gamer hell.
I don't agree that latency matters any which way, especially if you don't start with the assumption that it would be done wrong. The thread began with a mention of allowing the clients to do whatever projection would work. Half a second ago the server knew player A was heading toward the corner, and told you where he'd be when you could expect to get the packet, and 5 ms ago it told him that last it heard, half a second ago you were going to be at the corner now. You fire and hit the simulation of A, which the server can verify, so the server tells player A he done been shot. The server has to have some rules for how to settle some cases, but a happy intermediate can be decided. And frankly, at 500 ms, you're kinda boned anyway, sorry.
But it doesn't matter where the calculation is. The time at which information is available to each party doesn't change, and the server at least can come to a reasonable decision between the players. And the since the players are most likely not colluding, the server can lie to them both to make things seem consistent.
That's still irrelevant to the point, because the client can simulate as if its request was accepted. As long as the server can retroactively accept that the client did something half a second ago, and the client can verify that the server OK'd its transaction half a second ago that was sent one second ago, everything'll work. There's nothing stopping the client using every trick in the book, the entire point is the server not treating it as gospel, which is the same as 'verifying' the client. Verifying good!
WoW actually uses line of sight with terrain, so it's still not terribly kind in that regard to processing power.
(writing quickly, gotta run, sorry for errors or brevity)
In hindsight, I'm suspicious that there's been some misinformation about the specifics of the lawsuit.
If J.K. Rowling is suing over the lexicon's use of her characters and excerpts from her book, then it's a work of research and should be protected.
If, however, and I think this is reasonably the case, Rowling is suing over the lexicon publisher's refusal to remove her contribution to the website that was ostensibly free to the community but has been illegitimately co-opted (with or without a theoretical click-through I know nothing about, I was just hypothesizing), then they're changing a publishing agreement and Rowling's case is a lot stronger.
I don't know which is the case, but I'm now leaning towards J.K. being in the right.
First, a little clarification - I think I implied things that I didn't mean to. I don't know if there was a click-through license at all. I've just read secondhand that Rowling contributed to the site, and there was or was not such a thing. I'm presuming that the site's hosts had this plan all along, or at least for quite a while, and thus would try to cover their asses. Since I wasn't trying to make a point about click-throughs I just assumed the worst case. If there wasn't, Rowling can claim they're using her contribution to the site without her permission. If there was, it probably wouldn't hold up and Rowling can still make the same claim. However, the court case the article is talking about originally didn't seem to be about this matter.
In writing this post however, I'm really suspicion that the news posted about it so far is actually way off the mark. Everyone's talking about Rowling suing about the use of her books and her characters, but it might actually be the case that she's suing over the lexicon publisher's refusal to redact her contributions made to an ostensibly free site for the fans. If that's actually the case then my position takes a 180 and Rowling's in the right. If.
Latency isn't a problem with the GP's point - the game model can be designed to make it a non-issue. In fact it's not terribly harder than the way it's done now.
The GP's idea is merely that instead of grabbing a powerup and saying "I now have 100 health!", the client can only say "I move forward" and the server determines that he ran into the powerup, how much health he starts with, and how much he gets, and then tells the client "you have 98 health!".
The REAL problem for MMOs that I see is server processing power - One server with ten thousand clients doing all the physics calculations is a lot cheaper than one server doing the physics calculations for ten thousand clients.
My right to vote is worth the lives of every US politician.
*cracks knuckles threateningly*
They're all assholes from our POV, but only one will reduce your rights forever if they win.
It's kinda sad that she's disillusioned, but she's within her rights to sue. Now it's for the courts to decide.
Unfortunately for her case, the Lexicon is a work of research, which IS protected by copyright law. They can talk about the characters, analyze plot, create timelines of the stories, and excerpt text from the books all day long, and they're doing original research. This is what copyright law is for! She seems to have an inflated idea of the rights that copyright gives her, which is NOT a blanket of control over everything containing the words 'Harry Potter'.
Now, the site owners might be total sleaze-buckets and started a site with the covert intention of selling the work of the community, but then the failure was that of the community to post on a site where the (I'm assuming, I have no idea if this is the case) user account agreement claimed that all postings are the property of the site owner. If the site didn't have that, then everyone that ever posted can say they don't want their work used, and they'd have to take it out.
But then, anyone can sue for any reason. It, again, is for the courts to decide whether their claim is legitimate.
The lexicon would be a work of research, i.e. cataloging spells, creating a timeline. That kind of work is explicitly protected in copyright law, while a story (ab)using the characters owned by her is not. It's just not the same thing, she's just bitter because her mistaken take on copyright law, like so many people, leads her to believe that she has complete control over everything with the words 'Harry Potter' on it.
What she plans to do with her money (charity, hookers, whatever) doesn't make a bit of difference, and doesn't oblige the publishers of the lexicon in any way.
The one thing the publishers can't claim is that theirs is official or endorsed. That alone gives Rowling plenty enough of a head-start for her own encyclopedia potter, along with her ability to add details to the world that don't already exist. The lexicon can't do that, or else it loses some validity of its claim to be research if it doesn't extrapolate from known facts (The books, things Rowling's said publicly already).
Now Rowling's best case is probably that she contributed to the website and now her work is going to be used for profit that she doesn't want it to be. Any tacit click-through agreement saying the works contributed belong to the publisher probably won't hold up in court, and it's a valid complaint on J.K's part - but they only need to excise her contributions and continue on a bit unofficially less endorsed.
Really that's the sleaziest thing the lexicon's trying to do IMO and it has proper recourse. The courts should toss J.K. out on her ass for the case that she's actually bringing.