It's interesting to me that most of the comments I see so far involve PC games. One huge difference with console games is that they are generally unpatchable, and therefore, any feedback on the part of gamers will only get incorporated into the next installment of the game. If the game is truly a bust, there may not be a next installment, so console developers have a greater motivation to get the important design issues (game mechanics, balance, replayability) right the first time.
This is a huge advantage if your development team is good at game design, and a huge disadvantage if your developers suck at it. For better or worse, the rules of a console game are essentially static. On the other hand, players of PC games know that they can influence the developers (via posting on official message boards and the like) in an attempt to get the rules of the game to work in their favor. Therefore PC gamers are more likely to be voice any gripes they have about the game.
It'd be interesting to see a PC game-development group come out and say "for the first N months that our game is out, there will be no gameplay-affecting patches, only bugfixes and the like"... this would discourage people from going straight to the messageboards with "OMGOMGOMG I got pwn3d by strategy X, and I'm too much of an idiot to figure out how to beat strategy X, so clearly strategy X is overpowered, please nerf". Having a moratorium on balance patches would actually force people to think, "well, I think strategy X is overpowered... but they're not going to fix it for at least 2 months... so in the meantime I better shut up and figure out some way of countering it."
Part of the reason I don't play Warcraft III anymore is that I don't have a ton of time to dedicate to nothing but games, and the balance-update cycle for WC3 seemed to be so short that every time I played it was a different game -- each of the units I was used to playing suddenly became stronger or weaker, or cost more, or less, or took a longer time to build... it got to the point where it was impossible to actually play a good game without revisiting the messageboards every day to see what the current complaints were about (and therefore what would be nerfed in the next patch.)
The Diebold machines are... or at least have the capability of being controlled remotely, with no authentication or encryption. See 25 pages worth of problems with the voting machines from Avi Rubin's site: http://avirubin.com/vote/
A sentence from the abstract sums it all up: "We highlight several issues including unauthorized privilege escalation, incorrect use of cryptography, vulnerabilities to network threats, and poor software development processes."
"With a system like this in place the security of the electronic machines doesn't MATTER."
Wrong. An attacker could still hypothetically gain remote access to a voting machine, and use this access (along with an observer at the polliing location) to track which voter voted for which candidate. Besides the obvious privacy issues, this raises a huge issue of potential fraud or buying of votes... that's why we use a secret ballot system in the first place. If the voting machine isn't secure against attacks, the idea of "secret ballots" is essentially null and void.
One good resource for finding full-text computer science papers is CiteSeer (http://citeseer.nj.nec.com). CiteSeer is great in that it incorporates something like Google's PageRank -- works are sorted by the number of times each is cited. Since the earliest / most significant papers in a field are the most likely to be widely cited, this is a great way to get an idea of the most important recent papers in a field. One caveat is that CiteSeer does have more publications of recent work than older stuff. Sorry to say it, since you explicitly mentioned not requiring univeristy resources, but if you're looking for great publications from the 50's or 60's you're still probably best off looking through the Journal of the ACM.
One fairly good idea is to find out the basic ideas of the field first from a textbook, then search for the seminal papers in this field. For instance, a quick scan of any recent machine learning book would probably give you at least a baic understanding of things like neural nets, decision trees, Bayes nets, Gaussian mixture models, Expectation Maximization, Q-Learning, K-Means, K-Nearest Neighbor,....
I'd not try looking for "computer science papers" until you had a relatively small subset of computer science you want to look at in depth. Once you figure out that subset, it should be a simple matter to find the papers you want -- get the names of the people who started the field, search for their home pages (since computer science is a very young field, most of them are still alive, and most have home pages with full lists of publications), search for their names on CiteSeer, and (if you want to go further in depth) search for people who cited the seminal papers -- this will get you some links more in-depth analysis and criticism of their work.
It terms of "theoretical future stuff"... well, find some papers written in the last year or two, and take a look at the "future work" section.:)
Re:What's with AIBO and DCMA?
on
Feral Robot Dogs
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Check out Tekkotsu -- it's an open-source library for the AIBO, being developed by a bunch of folks at CMU. The "Fearless Leader and Principal Scientist" of the project is Dave Touretzky, whom Slashdotters may remember as the man behind the Gallery of CSS Descramblers and his testimony in the NY DVD trial.
It once cost a substantial amount of money to buy an AIBO devkit from Sony; I now think they're wising up by opening up the SDK and allowing GPLd libraries like Tekkotsu to exist.
The *real* name for this is photic sneezing. Get the Straight Dope on it from this page. There was an article on it in Discover magazine; you might be able to find that online. A quick search just turns up this, which isn't the article I remember, but contains the interesting fact that "The trait travels in families -- approximately 50 percent of children born to photic sneezers are photic sneezers themselves -- so it should be possible to identify one or more genes that are responsible."
Re:Anyone tried a programmable game controller?
on
Tetris AI System
·
· Score: 1
> There are lots of ways that you could make a computer-controlled > controller... Not all of them cheap. You could, for example, dedicate > a section of the screen to I/O, and use a series of photogates to open > / close the bridge across the controller pads. You don't get analog > sensitivity, but it works. I was sketching out ideas for ways of > recording to standard audio tape, using pitch in and pitch out filters > for the line... or a simple big-ass array of tape decks connected > together by common buttons. This would allow for playback of > controller imputs, which would be a boon to testing.
The tape idea is pretty cool. I don't really need or want analog sensitivity; in general I hate analog joysticks anyways. All I really want is some sort of hardware device that has 12-16 switches that I can flip programmatically.
> However, I'm not so sure that simple playback of keyboard combinations > would be good for anything but leveling. The dedicated programmable > pads in vogue several years back were quite gimmocky, and was less > responsive than was acceptable for fighting games at the time. Since > then, fighters have gotten significantly faster, and even more picky > about timing issues. It's easier just to imput the gamepad commands > yourself.
I'm not sure about that. My roommate plays street fighter a lot (i.e. has been to dozens of tournamenets in the couple years I've known him) and does know people who have programmable pads that are at least fairly useful.
> This is not to say that programmable controllers don't have their > place... a programmable controller took my Castlevania: SOTN character > to level 92 in just under a week. Programmable controllers > [thinkgeek.com] continue to exist, and can had for a reasonable amount > of money.
True, but it's not possible to do the bit *i* want to do, i.e. write AI players for specific games, with a standard programmable controller. It's mostly my roommate who would appreciate the fighting-game scripting idea.
> But the problem with visual recognition on modern 3d games is > staggering... MIT has entire departments devoted to similar > topics. You might be able to do it if you could convince the game to > output stereoscopic images, (there was an article recently on a > stereoscopic voxel technology), but a subsection of this sort of > problem is what you would write your doctorate on. If you can get your > hands on the base textures for the game, and redo the graphics engine > to give depth and object clues along color lines, you could do it. But > not as it stands, and not to a remote box.
It's not an area where I'm without expertise. I do work in a computer-vision lab, doing computer-vision sorts of things. I'd start out slow, with simpler games like Tetris Attack, which is nothing like tetris but infinitely superior IMHO; would be especially fun to write AI for this game since the AI included in the same is rather good and only has one or two real weaknesses at max difficulty.
Running a game in something like an SNES emulator would also be a feasible idea; that way one can flip off all but the sprite layer and maybe another layer or two that have items of interest.
Anyone tried a programmable game controller?
on
Tetris AI System
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I've been pondering creating a programmable video game controller for a while now. Basically, what I want is a computer program running on a PC that can control a video game console as a standard joystick. I'm envisioning a daemon that runs and just sends the appropriate button-pressed command out whenever it receives data packets. This could be used both for AI/Vision-type situations like this, or as a simple programmable pad (you could, for example, write a program that outputs a certain string of button-presses whenever a keyboard key is pressed; useful for fighting games.)
My roommate already has (basically) a universal arcade stick that he made himself -- has interfaces for connecting to PCs, Sega Dreamcast, Playstation, PS2, Nintendo 64, etc. I figure all I need is a way of controlling the device by basically pressing switches.
My problem is that I don't know any way of doing this cheaply (the piece of hardware used by the guy in this story is over $100). I was thinking of maybe using the parallel port, which has 8 data lines, but that's not enough lines for newer systems and I'm not sure it would work anyways.
Does anyone have any ideas on how this might be achieved? It's kinda coincidental that this article popped up today since I just thought about this for the first time in months earlier today.:)
Do this for all the possible combinations of where-to-place-the-current-piece, and take the one with the highest merit.
The author admits that
With this approach, the choice of metrics and relative
weights is critical. Even slight weight changes can
lead to profound differences in performance.
I didn't spend a lot of time developing the metrics and
weights for my application -- but I stumbled upon some
metrics and weights that perform well. I have considered
writing a function to explore the 5-dimensional "weight-space"
for my five metrics above, playing hundreds of games for
various combinations of weights in a search for the best
weight combination for overall average performance.
Which means, basically, he's not doing any traditional AI techniques (like using neural networks or genetic algorithms) to optimize this formula in any way.
There's no way this player plays "optimally", in any sense of the word, regardless of what/. editors put in the story to hype it.:)
If you liked Star Ocean 2, try Valkyrie Profile for the PSX. It's also by Enix/Tri-Ace, and a very unique game -- how many RPGs let you start out as a god?? (Aside from maybe Actraiser, another Enix title) The basic plot is: you are Lenneth, recruited by the all-Father Odin as a Valkyrie (battle maiden). Your goal is to recruit fighters (Einherjar) from the troubled souls of the world, to fight in the final battle of Ragnarok which will decide the fate of the world. All the fighters you recruit have some sort of tragic story attached to them that ends up with the character being killed -- and Valkyrie recruiting them into the Einherjar. These characters stay with you until you "send them up" to Asgard to fight against the Vanir. Every so often (the game is divided into chapters) you return to Valhalla and can see the progress of the fighters you sent up, as well as be bitched at or praised by your superiors (primarily Freya and Odin).
The dungeons are a nice platform game/RPG blend, with puzzles and the battle system, while not Star Ocean's, is very unique. Basically each character is assigned a button on your control pad and gets some number of attacks per round (depending on the weapon they have equipped). You can arrange these attacks in any order (outside battle in the character's status screen); some of them have different characteristics like knocking enemies back, or up into the air, or down onto the ground. Hitting a character's button causes that character to execute the next attack in his/her sequence, and you can hit multiple buttons for multiple characters simultaneously or before the previous character's attack has finished. You then get "combos", like in a fighting game, where the enemy cannot recover or block once they have been hit once and you can continue hitting them until they return to a standing state. However these combos will be limited since each character only has some number of attacks per round. Furthermore, there's a meter that counts up while you're comboing an enemy, and if the meter reaches 100 any of your characters that participated in the attack can unleash a special attack.
If you really want to be as good as possible during the game, setting up your order of attacks for battles can be incredibly complex, as there are different bonuses for hitting the enemy while in the air vs. on the ground vs. on-the-ground-and-recovering. Also, attacks do more damage when the number of hits in the combo is high, so it pays to put your characters that have strong, low-hit-number attacks near the end of the combo.
All in all, it's an excellent game, very well-executed and very unique.
I just got a second monitor for my machine at home a couple weeks ago. I'm still getting used to the setup, but I have a 19-incher at 1600x1200 on the left of a 14-incher at 800x600 on the right. For what it's worth, I'm using KDE 3 on Linux and the support for multihead works great. Win2K, OTOH, crashes if it tries to load drivers for my second video card.
Right now I'm developing a Java program, so I've got emacs and three shell windows open on one virtual desktop, on the big monitor. emacs is 80 characters wide and the full height of the screen tall, with the three shell windows filling up the rest of the screen space. On the smaller monitor I have Konqueror opened to the JDK 1.4 online documentation.
This setup lets me look at the documentation while I'm coding without obscuring either the code itself or the output on any of my terminals. I don't know whether that's a timesaver or not but it's certainly a *mindsaver*; I find it much easier to think about my code when I can see the code, the results, and the docs all at once.
Incidentally, it also saves me keypresses and/or mouse motions (no dragging around of windows, pressing alt-tab, etc), which is more important for me than other considerations, since I have a mild case of wrist tendonitis that I don't want to get worse (again).
I don't have time to individually respond to any of the posts here, but I'll be posting periodic updates on my web page. There are a couple up now (I have more info on why my package was stopped from HK; apparently *all* packages from lik-sang.com shipped in the last week or so have been detained...) and I'll be adding more as I get more info -- I've been rather inundated with e-mails in the last couple hours.:) Thanks to everyone here for your support; I'm hoping we can get this issue resolved soon.
"How many people really need a multiple-simultaneous-user OS, anyway?"
Example: our labs here (at my university) have a site license for Mathematica. Not having the cash to afford buying Mathematica for myself, and not wanting to walk 2 miles to the lab that actually hosts the program, I know that I can ssh into the lab's machines under my account and run Mathematica in an x session from my dorm.
I'm sure that similar stuff is possible in windows, but not built into the OS and windowing system by default.
What about linking to something which clearly isn't a "circumvention device". Change the line:
typedef unsigned char byte;
near the top of css-descramble.c to:
typedef unsigned char bite_me;
The source code won't compile or run correctly, and is hence useless to anyone unless they know enough to change the line to something useful. (And, finding out on your own what the source code does, and making it compatible is illegal reverse-engineering, right?;))
"5% of university bandwidth is a hell of a lot as well."
5%? More like 35-60% at the university I'm at goes to Napster's ports. Personally, I'm happy they blocked it (as of a week ago)... it not only keeps my roommate from downloading more god-awful music, but, judging from download throughput (d/l'ed kernel 2.2.14 a week before and a week after the ban, since I knew in advance when it'd happen), the network connection to the outside world is roughly 25% faster than before.
The statistic given by the person in Networking & Telecommunications Services (whom I know and trust for reliability) is that the bandwidth eaten up by Napster was costing the university over $1,000,000 a year.
To those who are against banning Napster, I ask if they would say that their university has a responsibility to hand out $1,000,000 of free CD's to its students... 'cause that's essentially what would be happening here if they hadn't just blocked Napster.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a huge advantage if your development team is good at game design, and a huge disadvantage if your developers suck at it. For better or worse, the rules of a console game are essentially static. On the other hand, players of PC games know that they can influence the developers (via posting on official message boards and the like) in an attempt to get the rules of the game to work in their favor. Therefore PC gamers are more likely to be voice any gripes they have about the game.
It'd be interesting to see a PC game-development group come out and say "for the first N months that our game is out, there will be no gameplay-affecting patches, only bugfixes and the like"... this would discourage people from going straight to the messageboards with "OMGOMGOMG I got pwn3d by strategy X, and I'm too much of an idiot to figure out how to beat strategy X, so clearly strategy X is overpowered, please nerf". Having a moratorium on balance patches would actually force people to think, "well, I think strategy X is overpowered... but they're not going to fix it for at least 2 months... so in the meantime I better shut up and figure out some way of countering it."
Part of the reason I don't play Warcraft III anymore is that I don't have a ton of time to dedicate to nothing but games, and the balance-update cycle for WC3 seemed to be so short that every time I played it was a different game -- each of the units I was used to playing suddenly became stronger or weaker, or cost more, or less, or took a longer time to build... it got to the point where it was impossible to actually play a good game without revisiting the messageboards every day to see what the current complaints were about (and therefore what would be nerfed in the next patch.)
The Diebold machines are... or at least have the capability of being controlled remotely, with no authentication or encryption. See 25 pages worth of problems with the voting machines from Avi Rubin's site: http://avirubin.com/vote/ A sentence from the abstract sums it all up: "We highlight several issues including unauthorized privilege escalation, incorrect use of cryptography, vulnerabilities to network threats, and poor software development processes."
"With a system like this in place the security of the electronic machines doesn't MATTER."
Wrong. An attacker could still hypothetically gain remote access to a voting machine, and use this access (along with an observer at the polliing location) to track which voter voted for which candidate. Besides the obvious privacy issues, this raises a huge issue of potential fraud or buying of votes... that's why we use a secret ballot system in the first place. If the voting machine isn't secure against attacks, the idea of "secret ballots" is essentially null and void.
One good resource for finding full-text computer science papers is CiteSeer (http://citeseer.nj.nec.com). CiteSeer is great in that it incorporates something like Google's PageRank -- works are sorted by the number of times each is cited. Since the earliest / most significant papers in a field are the most likely to be widely cited, this is a great way to get an idea of the most important recent papers in a field. One caveat is that CiteSeer does have more publications of recent work than older stuff. Sorry to say it, since you explicitly mentioned not requiring univeristy resources, but if you're looking for great publications from the 50's or 60's you're still probably best off looking through the Journal of the ACM.
....
:)
One fairly good idea is to find out the basic ideas of the field first from a textbook, then search for the seminal papers in this field. For instance, a quick scan of any recent machine learning book would probably give you at least a baic understanding of things like neural nets, decision trees, Bayes nets, Gaussian mixture models, Expectation Maximization, Q-Learning, K-Means, K-Nearest Neighbor,
I'd not try looking for "computer science papers" until you had a relatively small subset of computer science you want to look at in depth. Once you figure out that subset, it should be a simple matter to find the papers you want -- get the names of the people who started the field, search for their home pages (since computer science is a very young field, most of them are still alive, and most have home pages with full lists of publications), search for their names on CiteSeer, and (if you want to go further in depth) search for people who cited the seminal papers -- this will get you some links more in-depth analysis and criticism of their work.
It terms of "theoretical future stuff"... well, find some papers written in the last year or two, and take a look at the "future work" section.
It once cost a substantial amount of money to buy an AIBO devkit from Sony; I now think they're wising up by opening up the SDK and allowing GPLd libraries like Tekkotsu to exist.
The *real* name for this is photic sneezing. Get the Straight Dope on it from this page. There was an article on it in Discover magazine; you might be able to find that online. A quick search just turns up this, which isn't the article I remember, but contains the interesting fact that "The trait travels in families -- approximately 50 percent of children born to photic sneezers are photic sneezers themselves -- so it should be possible to identify one or more genes that are responsible."
> There are lots of ways that you could make a computer-controlled
> controller... Not all of them cheap. You could, for example, dedicate
> a section of the screen to I/O, and use a series of photogates to open
> / close the bridge across the controller pads. You don't get analog
> sensitivity, but it works. I was sketching out ideas for ways of
> recording to standard audio tape, using pitch in and pitch out filters
> for the line... or a simple big-ass array of tape decks connected
> together by common buttons. This would allow for playback of
> controller imputs, which would be a boon to testing.
The tape idea is pretty cool. I don't really need or want analog
sensitivity; in general I hate analog joysticks anyways. All I really
want is some sort of hardware device that has 12-16 switches that I
can flip programmatically.
> However, I'm not so sure that simple playback of keyboard combinations
> would be good for anything but leveling. The dedicated programmable
> pads in vogue several years back were quite gimmocky, and was less
> responsive than was acceptable for fighting games at the time. Since
> then, fighters have gotten significantly faster, and even more picky
> about timing issues. It's easier just to imput the gamepad commands
> yourself.
I'm not sure about that. My roommate plays street fighter a lot
(i.e. has been to dozens of tournamenets in the couple years I've
known him) and does know people who have programmable pads that are at
least fairly useful.
> This is not to say that programmable controllers don't have their
> place... a programmable controller took my Castlevania: SOTN character
> to level 92 in just under a week. Programmable controllers
> [thinkgeek.com] continue to exist, and can had for a reasonable amount
> of money.
True, but it's not possible to do the bit *i* want to do, i.e. write
AI players for specific games, with a standard programmable
controller. It's mostly my roommate who would appreciate the
fighting-game scripting idea.
> But the problem with visual recognition on modern 3d games is
> staggering... MIT has entire departments devoted to similar
> topics. You might be able to do it if you could convince the game to
> output stereoscopic images, (there was an article recently on a
> stereoscopic voxel technology), but a subsection of this sort of
> problem is what you would write your doctorate on. If you can get your
> hands on the base textures for the game, and redo the graphics engine
> to give depth and object clues along color lines, you could do it. But
> not as it stands, and not to a remote box.
It's not an area where I'm without expertise. I do work in a
computer-vision lab, doing computer-vision sorts of things. I'd start
out slow, with simpler games like Tetris Attack, which is nothing like
tetris but infinitely superior IMHO; would be especially fun to write
AI for this game since the AI included in the same is rather good and
only has one or two real weaknesses at max difficulty.
Running a game in something like an SNES emulator would also be a
feasible idea; that way one can flip off all but the sprite layer and
maybe another layer or two that have items of interest.
I've been pondering creating a programmable video game controller for a while now. Basically, what I want is a computer program running on a PC that can control a video game console as a standard joystick. I'm envisioning a daemon that runs and just sends the appropriate button-pressed command out whenever it receives data packets. This could be used both for AI/Vision-type situations like this, or as a simple programmable pad (you could, for example, write a program that outputs a certain string of button-presses whenever a keyboard key is pressed; useful for fighting games.)
:)
My roommate already has (basically) a universal arcade stick that he made himself -- has interfaces for connecting to PCs, Sega Dreamcast, Playstation, PS2, Nintendo 64, etc. I figure all I need is a way of controlling the device by basically pressing switches.
My problem is that I don't know any way of doing this cheaply (the piece of hardware used by the guy in this story is over $100). I was thinking of maybe using the parallel port, which has 8 data lines, but that's not enough lines for newer systems and I'm not sure it would work anyways.
Does anyone have any ideas on how this might be achieved? It's kinda coincidental that this article popped up today since I just thought about this for the first time in months earlier today.
In fact, his formula for determining how to place a piece just looks like this:
f32_Merit = (10.0f)*(float)(i32_RowsEliminated);( ));
f32_Merit += (-1.0f)*(float)(TempBoard.TotalOccupiedCells());
f32_Merit += (-7.0f)*(float)(TempBoard.TotalShadowedHoles());
f32_Merit += (-1.0f)*(float)(TempBoard.PileHeightWeightedCells
f32_Merit += (-1.5f)*(float)(TempBoard.SumOfWellHeights());
Do this for all the possible combinations of where-to-place-the-current-piece, and take the one with the highest merit.
The author admits that
Which means, basically, he's not doing any traditional AI techniques (like using neural networks or genetic algorithms) to optimize this formula in any way.There's no way this player plays "optimally", in any sense of the word, regardless of what /. editors put in the story to hype it. :)
If you liked Star Ocean 2, try Valkyrie Profile for the PSX. It's also by Enix/Tri-Ace, and a very unique game -- how many RPGs let you start out as a god?? (Aside from maybe Actraiser, another Enix title) The basic plot is: you are Lenneth, recruited by the all-Father Odin as a Valkyrie (battle maiden). Your goal is to recruit fighters (Einherjar) from the troubled souls of the world, to fight in the final battle of Ragnarok which will decide the fate of the world. All the fighters you recruit have some sort of tragic story attached to them that ends up with the character being killed -- and Valkyrie recruiting them into the Einherjar. These characters stay with you until you "send them up" to Asgard to fight against the Vanir. Every so often (the game is divided into chapters) you return to Valhalla and can see the progress of the fighters you sent up, as well as be bitched at or praised by your superiors (primarily Freya and Odin).
The dungeons are a nice platform game/RPG blend, with puzzles and the battle system, while not Star Ocean's, is very unique. Basically each character is assigned a button on your control pad and gets some number of attacks per round (depending on the weapon they have equipped). You can arrange these attacks in any order (outside battle in the character's status screen); some of them have different characteristics like knocking enemies back, or up into the air, or down onto the ground. Hitting a character's button causes that character to execute the next attack in his/her sequence, and you can hit multiple buttons for multiple characters simultaneously or before the previous character's attack has finished. You then get "combos", like in a fighting game, where the enemy cannot recover or block once they have been hit once and you can continue hitting them until they return to a standing state. However these combos will be limited since each character only has some number of attacks per round. Furthermore, there's a meter that counts up while you're comboing an enemy, and if the meter reaches 100 any of your characters that participated in the attack can unleash a special attack.
If you really want to be as good as possible during the game, setting up your order of attacks for battles can be incredibly complex, as there are different bonuses for hitting the enemy while in the air vs. on the ground vs. on-the-ground-and-recovering. Also, attacks do more damage when the number of hits in the combo is high, so it pays to put your characters that have strong, low-hit-number attacks near the end of the combo.
All in all, it's an excellent game, very well-executed and very unique.
I just got a second monitor for my machine at home a couple weeks ago. I'm still getting used to the setup, but I have a 19-incher at 1600x1200 on the left of a 14-incher at 800x600 on the right. For what it's worth, I'm using KDE 3 on Linux and the support for multihead works great. Win2K, OTOH, crashes if it tries to load drivers for my second video card.
Right now I'm developing a Java program, so I've got emacs and three shell windows open on one virtual desktop, on the big monitor. emacs is 80 characters wide and the full height of the screen tall, with the three shell windows filling up the rest of the screen space. On the smaller monitor I have Konqueror opened to the JDK 1.4 online documentation.
This setup lets me look at the documentation while I'm coding without obscuring either the code itself or the output on any of my terminals. I don't know whether that's a timesaver or not but it's certainly a *mindsaver*; I find it much easier to think about my code when I can see the code, the results, and the docs all at once.
Incidentally, it also saves me keypresses and/or mouse motions (no dragging around of windows, pressing alt-tab, etc), which is more important for me than other considerations, since I have a mild case of wrist tendonitis that I don't want to get worse (again).
Colin McMillen
"How many people really need a multiple-simultaneous-user OS, anyway?"
Example: our labs here (at my university) have a site license for Mathematica. Not having the cash to afford buying Mathematica for myself, and not wanting to walk 2 miles to the lab that actually hosts the program, I know that I can ssh into the lab's machines under my account and run Mathematica in an x session from my dorm.
I'm sure that similar stuff is possible in windows, but not built into the OS and windowing system by default.
What about linking to something which clearly isn't a "circumvention device". Change the line:
;))
typedef unsigned char byte;
near the top of css-descramble.c to:
typedef unsigned char bite_me;
The source code won't compile or run correctly, and is hence useless to anyone unless they know enough to change the line to something useful. (And, finding out on your own what the source code does, and making it compatible is illegal reverse-engineering, right?
"5% of university bandwidth is a hell of a lot as well."
5%? More like 35-60% at the university I'm at goes to Napster's ports. Personally, I'm happy they blocked it (as of a week ago)... it not only keeps my roommate from downloading more god-awful music, but, judging from download throughput (d/l'ed kernel 2.2.14 a week before and a week after the ban, since I knew in advance when it'd happen), the network connection to the outside world is roughly 25% faster than before.
The statistic given by the person in Networking & Telecommunications Services (whom I know and trust for reliability) is that the bandwidth eaten up by Napster was costing the university over $1,000,000 a year.
To those who are against banning Napster, I ask if they would say that their university has a responsibility to hand out $1,000,000 of free CD's to its students... 'cause that's essentially what would be happening here if they hadn't just blocked Napster.