You don't need to be a programmer to change the rules of Freeciv (units, technologies, etc.). All of that is specified in textual data files that are pretty easy to read.
Their goal, which I think they're close to, is to make AC a pure modpack (ruleset+tileset) and have all the code integrated into mainline freeciv. For now, you need to apply some patches.
The "what is" searches are taking from glossary. "what is foo" returns the first entry from "define:foo" along with a slightly re-ordered web search for "foo".
This is a rather minor new feature: really just a UI tweak.
The ability to search for facts is new, unrelated, and much more impressive (even if there aren't many facts in it yet).
"Software should be free..everything should be free, including the BIOS". Nice concept, but reality is we live in what's called a zero-sum game. We as humanity have a finite amount of resources
This is completely untrue.
Every time you write software, you are increasing the total wealth of humanity. The software is useful, and no resource was consumed in producing it except your time. Therefore, the world is a positive-sum game.
If you consider time as a resource, then the world is still a positive sum game, because more time keeps flowing into it. Also, a person-hour can be used for achieving any purpose without a fundamental limit, so the total wealth of humanity is infinite.
There may be some particular resources which are zero-sum (ie the only way to get them is from other people), but I can't think of any. Elements can be mined (if you argue they belong to someone in the mine, then you can mine asteroids) or (in some cases) transmuted. Even land can be created.
Sometimes the best way to get something is to get it from someone else, but the fundamental way to get something is to create it. Humanity is about creation. Remember that in constructing your economic theories.
If the pressure which causes the triple point of water were appled to a square meter, a kilogram will be accelerated at x meters/seconds^2 where x is something we can measure very accurately. We can use this to define a kilogram. Admittedly, it's a little convoluted, but I suspect we can do the measurements much better than we can for Planks constant or Avagadro's number. There's also a smaller risk of discovering some twist in physical law that makes what we've done ill-defined.
Unfortunately, you may need to start your own movie studio. Here's how it went when they tried (taken from the APF:
Speaking of movies, what happened to the plans for a movie based on Mort?
"A production company was put together and there was US and Scandinavian and European involvement, and I wrote a couple of script drafts which went down well and everything was looking fine and then the US people said "Hey, we've been doing market research in Power Cable, Nebraska, and other centres of culture, and the Death/skeleton bit doesn't work for us, it's a bit of a downer, we have a prarm with it, so lose the skeleton". The rest of the consortium said, did you read the script? The Americans said: sure, we LOVE it, it's GREAT, it's HIGH CONCEPT. Just lose the Death angle, guys.
Whereupon, I'm happy to say, they were told to keep on with the medication and come back in a hundred years."
"The person also said that Americans "weren't ready for the treatment of Death as an amusing and sympathetic character". This was about 18 months/2 years before Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey."
"Currently, since the amount of money available for making movies in Europe is about sixpence, the consortium is looking for some more intelligent Americans in the film business. This may prove difficult.
It could have been worse. I've heard what Good Omens was looking like by the time Sovereign's option mercifully ran out -- set in America, no Four Horsemen... oh god."
"What you have to remember is that in the movies there are two types of people 1) the directors, artists, actors and so on who have to do things and are often quite human and 2) the other lifeforms. Unfortunately you have to deal with the other lifeforms first. It is impossible to exaggerate their baleful stupidity."
I suspect you would have a hard time getting a certificate from Verisign with the name "Microsoft" or "National Security Agency". I admit I haven't dealt with them though.
What a certificate does provide is traceability. If many people are defrauded by a website, the police can check their certificate and ask Verisign who received it. This gives them a (hopefully) rather traceable trail to follow.
The drudge-report page self-modifies to include the javascript at: http://z1.adserver.com/w/cp.x;rid=52;tid=4;ev=1;dt =1;ac=26;c=209;
That javascript changes each time you load it (I think there are only a handful and the server picks one pseudorandomly). This means that sometimes it will hit you with popups, and sometimes it won't.
The code is obfuscated and I haven't sorted through it. The easy way to block it is to redirect z1.adserver.com in you/etc/hosts or block it at your firewall.
You may need to click on a link in order to experience the popup, though the links themselves are legitemate http hrefs.
In ten years, fiberoptics may be cheap and all copper networking obsolete. What then?
Seriously, though, expect to need things you haven't thought of. Make sure every wall and floor can be opened relatively easily so that you can install the next big thing without having to anticipate it.
This resulted in a light output
of the projector of about 15 lm, which was still very comparable to
the brightness of a laptop when illuminating an area of 15"
diagonal
This sounds good to me. Picture a small keyboard/mouse-nipple with a motherboard/etc. underneath it connected to use of these. Weighs and bulks like a keyboard, but has a 15" screen in ordinary light and 19" (or more) in low light. Now switch the keyboard to one of the roll-up ones and restructure the laptop around the hard drive. It'll fit in your pocket and have an interface as good as a workstation.
It's only a Beta product, I suspect they'll do something about that before they launch.
Street-by-street maps with long/lat may be difficult to get for large parts of the world, however. The US data is already in databases. Admittedly, Europe, Japan, Australia and Israel probably have databases as well, so Google could just put up the five places that have this data, and use something weaker (inference from satellite data?) for the rest of the world. Or maybe just wait until the data becomes available.
Whatever they do, I doubt they'll just give up on it though. They know there's a whole wold out there, and they won't stop until they index every last bit.
Sadly, it costs $40 plus shipping on ebay, but it'll come down soon.
Not relevant, but highly amusing. And yes, I know the C1 has archetechtural advantages over the Zire 21 (parrelelism, floating point...). It'll happen to the OpenPower servers too.
The second confusion is between elegance and obviousness. Something is non-obvious if there's an established unmet need for it, and this is something for which that's clearly true. That this is the kind of solution which leads people to say "Oh, that's obviously the solution to use" marks it as elegant. The fact that nobody came up with it before marks it as non-obvious.
Nobody did this before (so far as I know, not having checked) because nobody needed it before. Nobody figured that URLs which included long numbers should be memorable. Thats what tinyurl is for. The solution is, in fact, obvious.
The idea of the obviousness standard is to not grant patents for things that would surely be invented anyway, as patents are intended to encourage invention and such patents would only stand in the way. Now, consider asking any nerd who han't read this slashdot article for a way to efficiently encode numbers in a URL. (S)He'll almost immediately suggest a higher base. Admittedly, the base is likely to be 32, which simplifies computation and improves efficiency rather than 30, but if you demonstrate enough confusing characters to justify 30, that solution will come up quickly as well (most likely along the lines of "find as many characters as you can; count them; use that base.") The nerd will have little need of a pause for thought. That's what obvious means.
Now if only we could get the courts to accept this standard. It would be fun watching professors re-invent patents on the stand with opposing lawyers objecting "he said 'um'! He had to think about it."
It needs to be novel and useful. Base 30 encoding is a trivial and inferior modification of base 64 encoding (which is more efficient in space and time). The earliest use of base 64 encoding in an internet standard I can find is from RFS 2045: MIME from 1996, but there must have been two interoperable implementations before that. Also see the Unix function a64l (in stdlib), which goes back at least to 1987, though I strongly suspect much longer.
Really, though, to anyone who's played with compact representations, higher bases are obvious. I'm sure no one patented base 64, and I suspect several different people came up with it independantly.
What I want to know is why base 30? It's an awkward number, which will just make everything more difficult. Is it just about obfoscating their formats? Fooling the patent office?
whether the missing mass lurks in galaxies, in galactic halos, or between galaxies is (as I recall) an open question.
Maybe there's more then one sort of dark matter, but the dark matter I've studied must be inside galaxies.
Dark matter is the extra mass needed to explain the observed motion of astronomical bodies in terms of known forces (ie gravity) after all the known matter is accounted for. In particular, galaxies rotate like rigid bodies (the same angular velocity at all radii) whereas the distribution of known mass (eg stars) suggests they shouldn't. An enormous amount of extra mass must be within the galaxies in a specific distribution to make this happen. (The alternative, which astrophysicists dislike, is that our equations for gravity are wrong for large distances.) This cloud is outside of a galaxy, so it isn't the missing matter.
Now, there may be other discrepancies between what we can see and what we can compute should be there, and this cloud could explain some of those.
Yes, that was a particularly embarrising bit of technobabble they misused. The most common baryons are protons and neutrons. Therefore, Baryons make up roughly 99.99% of normal matter. If they swept out the baryons, there'd be nothing left.
The fundamental problem with type inference is that it doesn't play well with polymorphism. In O'Caml, you can only create polymorphic functions either if they ignore the type altogether (ie 'a -> 'a) or if all the subtypes of a supertype are used (ie a match statement). The former is to weak to handle some cases, and the latter requires excessive wrapping to be useful.
Other than that, type inference is great, and it might be possible to find a better compromise than O'Caml (though it's theoretically impossible to solve it completely unless you're willing to introduce runtime elements). I could complain about the poor error messages in type conflicts, but that's a problem with the interpreter/compiler, not the language itself.
There are NEVER any problems with.rtfs, or with plain.txt documents
Let's not get carried away..txt files are subject to \n vs \r\n mangling and to various failures of 128-255 charsets (plus the occasional UTF-8 sneeking in). Come to think of it, the most common problem (\n vs \r\n) is MS's fault....
The format I've found most universal is HTML. So long as you stay away from scripts, specific fonts, and complex CSS, it can be read pretty much anywhere.
Also, most people don't have problems opening Word docs that are not the latest version
As de facto tech support for my family and friends, I've run into quite a few cases. The biggest problem seems to be cross-archetechture compatibility. Someone saves from Word 97 on a Mac and the only PC program that can open it is OpenOffice. If you don't run into this, you may be in a mono-archetechtural environment.
I suspect this happens because MS Word dumps data structures raw with integers in binary host format with no explicite magic. Openoffice can handle this because Sun engineers always pay attention to these things and found some accidental magic. Can anyone confirm that documents saved on Opteron can't be opened on x86, as I would predict?
And if you didn't boot into Linux for many months resulting in lots of unpatched security holes, and there were a ton of people trying to attack Linux boxes because Linux controlled 95% of the market, you'd have the same experience there.
Apart from the robots.txt and maybe the default.ida (I'm not sure what that is) these are all IIS worms trying to infect me. Note that Apache (which has more than three times IIS's market share) does not figure among the worms in this list. (Yes, there have been Apache worms, but none that even approached IIS's in scale).
When I sit down at a workstation in a lab at my university, I enter my username and password. When I ssh from there to a server, I don't need to. If I were to ssh to those servers from elsewhere, I would use the same password. When I change my student status (eg add/drop courses) through a web interface, it's the same username and password.
Most of the functionality is inside ssh/ssl. For the rest, we use LDAP. All of this works on Linux, Solaris and Windows (and I think Digital Unix, Netware, and AIX as well).
How is this not single sign-on?
As for an IDE, emacs is closer than you give it credit for. It encorporates compilation and debugging. It manages my files. It understands syntax. It may not do everything Eclipse does, but it integrates much more easily with outside tools for when you want to do something highly obscure. I consider that a worthy tradeoff. For those who don't, there's always Eclipse (etc.).
The post was about SSL certificates, not DNS. Cracking DNS (which is a lot harder than it sounds, anyway, with all the redundancy and caching) does nothing about SSL certificates. Whenever you begin an https transaction, you receive a certificate of identidy signed by someone your browser trusts. The list of trustees here is very small (Verisign is the most famous of them). These companies are vouching for the non-fraudulent nature of the websites and aren't easily fooled. When you connect to the phishing site, your browser should warn yoou that the source is untrusted.
If a worm managed to add a malicious certificate signer to the list of trusted certificate signers, this protection would be removed. Hopefully, the worm would be publicized thoroughly so people didn't fall for the phishing attacks that followed, but many people probably wouldn't get the word.
All this can be circumvented by simply not using SSL on the phishing site, but anyone who transmits their credit card numbers unencrypted deserves what they get.
You have my simpathy. That's the worst self-proclaimed CS department I've ever heard of. It really is better elsewhere.
Though if that's the best Canada can do, I'll have to plan a different escape route for in case the US becomes a fascist theocracy. Thanks for the warning.
People tend to think someone who graduated from Harvard is "better" than a guy who graduated from local community college, even though they both studied the exact same things.
[snip]
At least 3 years of my 4 year degree were useless to me in any practical sense, I didn't learn anything new. I was just there to jump through the hoops and get a piece of paper.
I think you've contradicted yourself. As a student at the University of Maryland, I have learned new and interesting things every year, and they will be useful if I pursue those fields (I am delibrately taken a wide breadth of courses, so I will have many options -- I probably won't use all of them, but I might use any of them). I took exactly one course to "jump through the hoops" and spent maybe five hours total in additional beuracracy. Harvard students tell similar stories.
If you're undergraduate education was as bad as you say (and I have no reason to doubt you), then the problem was probably with your university. Your university didn't (couldn't) teach the same things that UMd (or Harvard) would have, so it made you jump through hoops instead.
I know many people who received really good educations in college, and I know a fair number who didn't. Judging from the details of their stories, I think I can best conclude that different colleges are of very different qualities. I would go so far as to claim, based on limited experience, that the general quality of a school mostly lines up with its prestige (not always: Yale has more prestige than UWisconsin, but UWisconsin is the better school, at least in CS).
I realize one datapoint is all most of us really get regarding college, but judging anything on a single datapoint is unwise.
That does sound pretty good, but in my experience Dell will cause all sorts of other problems. Were you able to get specs on the systems before you bought them? I must have spent an hour on google trying to track don what onboard SATA controller I was purchasing so that I could check Linux support. Sure, it's easy to examine/proc/pci after you've bought it, but that means the money's already spent.
Also, did you get decent expandability? I wanted to add hard drives to a Dell box, and I wound up having to order floppy drives ($18 each!) so that I could take them out and have additional bays for the new drives. Needless to say, none of the spare bays I had sitting around were compatible with a Dell case.
Finally, I've generally found that you have to watch Dell at every turn to get a decent system. Far too often, I've seen them skimp on non-glamorous components (like busses) to the point that the hardware they advertised wasn't really useful.
And an afterthought: they have the most expensive discounts I've seen, sometimes several hundred dollars more than the original price.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't need to be a programmer to change the rules of Freeciv (units, technologies, etc.). All of that is specified in textual data files that are pretty easy to read.
Are you happy yet?
Their goal, which I think they're close to, is to make AC a pure modpack (ruleset+tileset) and have all the code integrated into mainline freeciv. For now, you need to apply some patches.
The "what is" searches are taking from glossary. "what is foo" returns the first entry from "define:foo" along with a slightly re-ordered web search for "foo". This is a rather minor new feature: really just a UI tweak.
The ability to search for facts is new, unrelated, and much more impressive (even if there aren't many facts in it yet).
Every time you write software, you are increasing the total wealth of humanity. The software is useful, and no resource was consumed in producing it except your time. Therefore, the world is a positive-sum game.
If you consider time as a resource, then the world is still a positive sum game, because more time keeps flowing into it. Also, a person-hour can be used for achieving any purpose without a fundamental limit, so the total wealth of humanity is infinite.
There may be some particular resources which are zero-sum (ie the only way to get them is from other people), but I can't think of any. Elements can be mined (if you argue they belong to someone in the mine, then you can mine asteroids) or (in some cases) transmuted. Even land can be created.
Sometimes the best way to get something is to get it from someone else, but the fundamental way to get something is to create it. Humanity is about creation. Remember that in constructing your economic theories.
If the pressure which causes the triple point of water were appled to a square meter, a kilogram will be accelerated at x meters/seconds^2 where x is something we can measure very accurately. We can use this to define a kilogram. Admittedly, it's a little convoluted, but I suspect we can do the measurements much better than we can for Planks constant or Avagadro's number. There's also a smaller risk of discovering some twist in physical law that makes what we've done ill-defined.
Some what would this disrupt?
What a certificate does provide is traceability. If many people are defrauded by a website, the police can check their certificate and ask Verisign who received it. This gives them a (hopefully) rather traceable trail to follow.
http://z1.adserver.com/w/cp.x;rid=52;tid=4;ev=1;d
That javascript changes each time you load it (I think there are only a handful and the server picks one pseudorandomly). This means that sometimes it will hit you with popups, and sometimes it won't.
The code is obfuscated and I haven't sorted through it. The easy way to block it is to redirect z1.adserver.com in you /etc/hosts or block it at your firewall.
You may need to click on a link in order to experience the popup, though the links themselves are legitemate http hrefs.
Seriously, though, expect to need things you haven't thought of. Make sure every wall and floor can be opened relatively easily so that you can install the next big thing without having to anticipate it.
I've wanted something like that for a long time.
Street-by-street maps with long/lat may be difficult to get for large parts of the world, however. The US data is already in databases. Admittedly, Europe, Japan, Australia and Israel probably have databases as well, so Google could just put up the five places that have this data, and use something weaker (inference from satellite data?) for the rest of the world. Or maybe just wait until the data becomes available.
Whatever they do, I doubt they'll just give up on it though. They know there's a whole wold out there, and they won't stop until they index every last bit.
Sadly, it costs $40 plus shipping on ebay, but it'll come down soon.
Not relevant, but highly amusing. And yes, I know the C1 has archetechtural advantages over the Zire 21 (parrelelism, floating point...). It'll happen to the OpenPower servers too.
The idea of the obviousness standard is to not grant patents for things that would surely be invented anyway, as patents are intended to encourage invention and such patents would only stand in the way. Now, consider asking any nerd who han't read this slashdot article for a way to efficiently encode numbers in a URL. (S)He'll almost immediately suggest a higher base. Admittedly, the base is likely to be 32, which simplifies computation and improves efficiency rather than 30, but if you demonstrate enough confusing characters to justify 30, that solution will come up quickly as well (most likely along the lines of "find as many characters as you can; count them; use that base.") The nerd will have little need of a pause for thought. That's what obvious means.
Now if only we could get the courts to accept this standard. It would be fun watching professors re-invent patents on the stand with opposing lawyers objecting "he said 'um'! He had to think about it."
Really, though, to anyone who's played with compact representations, higher bases are obvious. I'm sure no one patented base 64, and I suspect several different people came up with it independantly.
What I want to know is why base 30? It's an awkward number, which will just make everything more difficult. Is it just about obfoscating their formats? Fooling the patent office?
Dark matter is the extra mass needed to explain the observed motion of astronomical bodies in terms of known forces (ie gravity) after all the known matter is accounted for. In particular, galaxies rotate like rigid bodies (the same angular velocity at all radii) whereas the distribution of known mass (eg stars) suggests they shouldn't. An enormous amount of extra mass must be within the galaxies in a specific distribution to make this happen. (The alternative, which astrophysicists dislike, is that our equations for gravity are wrong for large distances.) This cloud is outside of a galaxy, so it isn't the missing matter.
Now, there may be other discrepancies between what we can see and what we can compute should be there, and this cloud could explain some of those.
Yes, that was a particularly embarrising bit of technobabble they misused. The most common baryons are protons and neutrons. Therefore, Baryons make up roughly 99.99% of normal matter. If they swept out the baryons, there'd be nothing left.
Other than that, type inference is great, and it might be possible to find a better compromise than O'Caml (though it's theoretically impossible to solve it completely unless you're willing to introduce runtime elements). I could complain about the poor error messages in type conflicts, but that's a problem with the interpreter/compiler, not the language itself.
The format I've found most universal is HTML. So long as you stay away from scripts, specific fonts, and complex CSS, it can be read pretty much anywhere.
I suspect this happens because MS Word dumps data structures raw with integers in binary host format with no explicite magic. Openoffice can handle this because Sun engineers always pay attention to these things and found some accidental magic. Can anyone confirm that documents saved on Opteron can't be opened on x86, as I would predict?
Why should OSs be any different?
Most of the functionality is inside ssh/ssl. For the rest, we use LDAP. All of this works on Linux, Solaris and Windows (and I think Digital Unix, Netware, and AIX as well).
How is this not single sign-on?
As for an IDE, emacs is closer than you give it credit for. It encorporates compilation and debugging. It manages my files. It understands syntax. It may not do everything Eclipse does, but it integrates much more easily with outside tools for when you want to do something highly obscure. I consider that a worthy tradeoff. For those who don't, there's always Eclipse (etc.).
If a worm managed to add a malicious certificate signer to the list of trusted certificate signers, this protection would be removed. Hopefully, the worm would be publicized thoroughly so people didn't fall for the phishing attacks that followed, but many people probably wouldn't get the word.
All this can be circumvented by simply not using SSL on the phishing site, but anyone who transmits their credit card numbers unencrypted deserves what they get.
Though if that's the best Canada can do, I'll have to plan a different escape route for in case the US becomes a fascist theocracy. Thanks for the warning.
If you're undergraduate education was as bad as you say (and I have no reason to doubt you), then the problem was probably with your university. Your university didn't (couldn't) teach the same things that UMd (or Harvard) would have, so it made you jump through hoops instead.
I know many people who received really good educations in college, and I know a fair number who didn't. Judging from the details of their stories, I think I can best conclude that different colleges are of very different qualities. I would go so far as to claim, based on limited experience, that the general quality of a school mostly lines up with its prestige (not always: Yale has more prestige than UWisconsin, but UWisconsin is the better school, at least in CS).
I realize one datapoint is all most of us really get regarding college, but judging anything on a single datapoint is unwise.
Also, did you get decent expandability? I wanted to add hard drives to a Dell box, and I wound up having to order floppy drives ($18 each!) so that I could take them out and have additional bays for the new drives. Needless to say, none of the spare bays I had sitting around were compatible with a Dell case.
Finally, I've generally found that you have to watch Dell at every turn to get a decent system. Far too often, I've seen them skimp on non-glamorous components (like busses) to the point that the hardware they advertised wasn't really useful.
And an afterthought: they have the most expensive discounts I've seen, sometimes several hundred dollars more than the original price.