Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:What's next, an email client and html editor? (Score 1) 360

by nsebban (#27407797) Attached to: Command Lines and the Future of Firefox
For me, it would be pretty much everything. I don't use the search field, I don't use the bookmarks, I use an online RSS reader, I don't print-preview and print web-pages, I don't use history, I don't use side-panels. I wish all this could at least be optional.

Many of FF3 features now rely on SQLite database as a data storage system. It's a great idea, it's really fast and all, but if there's a need to store data that way, for a web-browser, maybe there's too much data in the first place ?
Games

Believable Stupidity In Game AI 378

Posted by Soulskill from the much-more-common-in-real-players dept.
Gamasutra is running a feature written by Mick West, co-founder of Neversoft, about creating game AI that is dumb enough to defeat, yet intelligent enough that its "mistakes" are similar to those a real player would make, thus preserving the illusion that the AI is not just throwing the game. "The simplest way to introduce stupidity into AI is to reduce the amount of computation that it's allowed to perform. Chess AI generally performs billions of calculations when deciding what move to make. ... The problem with this approach is that it decreases the realism of the AI player. When you reduce the amount of computation, the AI will begin to make incredibly stupid mistakes — mistakes that are so stupid, no human would ever make them. The artificial nature of the game will then become apparent, which destroys the illusion of playing against a real opponent. ... By reducing the amount of computation, we create an AI opponent that is trying to win, but has been crippled in a way that leads to unrealistic gameplay."
Google

Google To Monitor Surfing Habits For Ad-Serving 219

Posted by CmdrTaco from the do-you-see-what-i-see dept.
superglaze (ZDNet UK) writes "Google is gearing up to launch cookie-based 'interest-based' advertising, which involves monitoring the user's passage across various WebSense partner sites. The idea is to have better-targeted advertising, which is not a million miles away from what Phorm is trying to do — the difference, it seems at first glance, is that Google is being relatively up-front about its intentions."
Games

Maxis Launches Spore API Contest 35

Posted by Soulskill from the not-the-three-letters-they're-known-for dept.
Today EA Maxis announced the beginning of a development contest for their new Spore API. They're calling on players to submit useful and interesting apps and widgets, and they've provided samples to show the kinds of ideas they're looking for. The samples include an update list for creations by game buddies, a creature dueling app, a creature tournament app, and a variety of viewers.
The Almighty Buck

The Formula That Killed Wall Street 561

Posted by kdawson from the easy-go dept.
We recently discussed the perspective that the harrowing of Wall Street was caused by over-reliance on computer models that produced a single number to characterize risk. Wired has a piece profiling David X. Li, the quant behind the formula that enabled the creation of such simple risk models. "For five years, Li's formula, known as a Gaussian copula function, looked like an unambiguously positive breakthrough, a piece of financial technology that allowed hugely complex risks to be modeled with more ease and accuracy than ever before. With his brilliant spark of mathematical legerdemain, Li made it possible for traders to sell vast quantities of new securities, expanding financial markets to unimaginable levels. His method was adopted by everybody from bond investors and Wall Street banks to ratings agencies and regulators. ... [T]he real danger was created not because any given trader adopted it but because every trader did. In financial markets, everybody doing the same thing is the classic recipe for a bubble and inevitable bust."
Government

Should Obama Give Stimulus To Open Source? 525

Posted by samzenpus from the more-money-please dept.
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Bill Snyder posits a deeper relationship between government and open source than was proposed in last week's open letter to Obama calling for broader open source adoption: economic stimulus. Since software vendors urged the president to go open source last week, security companies 'have raised scary points about vulnerabilities in open source,' suggesting they could step in to help secure an open source switch. Rather than opt for this kind of security through obscurity, Snyder argues in favor of earmarking funds for open source development to instead ensure security through transparency. 'Once the government expands its use and support of open source, venture money — which is drying up in the current recession — would again start flowing to those small companies, allowing them to hire or rehire some of the tens of thousands of unemployed IT workers,' he argues."
Windows

The Broken Design of Microsoft's "Fix it" Tool 165

Posted by kdawson from the teething-problems dept.
$luggo writes "Curious about MS Fix It, I recently went hunting in the MS knowledge base for articles that provide the new EZ-button. After locating on few, I decided to click the button to download the Microsoft Installer package containing the executable and/or files that automatically enable the DVD Library feature in Windows Vista Home Premium and Ultimate — on my XP Media Center. 'Surely, MS will use some scripting, HTTP User-Agent sniffing, or even Genuine Windows validation to verify that I am running Vista,' I thought. It did not and I canceled the download when I received the prompt to save the file. So, I wonder: is there a Fix-it for Fix it? Because I can easily imagine someone doing what I did without scrolling to the bottom of the KB article and verifying that the article applies to their OS/version. This is a great example poor design. Why not simply use the download approach that other articles / fixes / service packs use, whereby the user must select the appropriate OS?"
PHP

Submission + - Creating and using Phar archives in PHP V5.3

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: This article takes a close look at the new PHP5.3 feature called Phar, which is an archive format that can be used within PHP. Phar can be used to not only archive files but also to deliver and run an entire PHP application from a single file. Unlike JAR archives, Phar archives can be processed by PHP itself and don't require an external tool to create or use them.
Software

30th Anniversary of the (No Good) Spreadsheet 407

Posted by timothy from the malignant-cells dept.
theodp writes "PC Magazine's John C. Dvorak offers his curmudgeonly take on the 30th anniversary of the spreadsheet, which Dvorak blames for elevating once lowly bean counters to the executive suite and enabling them to make some truly horrible decisions. But even if you believe that VisiCalc was the root-of-all-evil, as Dvorak claims, your geek side still has to admire it for the programming tour-de-force that it was, implemented in 32KB memory using the look-Ma-no-multiply-or-divide instruction set of the 1MHz 8-bit 6502 processor that powered the Apple II." On the brighter side, one of my favorite things about Visicalc is the widely repeated story that it was snuck into businesses on Apple machines bought under the guise of word processors, but covertly used for accounting instead.
Transportation

First Flight of Jet Powered By Algae-Fuel 255

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the fish-tanks-for-fuel-tanks dept.
s31523 writes "Today a US airline carrier conducted a 90 minute test flight with one of its engines powered by a 50/50 blend of biofuel and normal aircraft fuel. This was the first flight by a US carrier after other airlines have reported trying similar flights. In February 2008, a Virgin 747 flew from London to Amsterdam partly using a fuel derived from a blend of Brazilian babassu nuts and coconuts. At the end of December, one engine of an Air New Zealand 747 was powered by a 50/50 blend of jatropha plant oil and standard A1 jet fuel."
Classic Games (Games)

The Return of (Old) PC Graphic Adventures 93

Posted by Soulskill from the back-to-the-past-ure dept.
KingofGnG writes "Though they belong to a genre already considered defunct and inadequate for the mainstream video game market, adventure games have a glorious past, a past that deserves to be remembered, and, of course, replayed. At the center of a good part of this effort of collective memory, there is ScummVM, the virtual machine which acts like an interface between the feelings and the puzzles from the good old times and the modern operating systems. As already highlighted before, the ScummVM target has grown immensely over time, going from the simple support of the 'classic' adventure games par excellence published by Lucasfilm/Lucasarts, to a range that includes virtually any single puzzle-solving game developed from the beginning of time up to the advent of the (Windows) NT platform. The last video game engine added to ScummVM within the past few days is Groovie, created by the software house Trilobyte for its first title released in 1993, The 7th Guest ."
Image

World's Oldest Marijuana Stash Found Screenshot-sm 108

Posted by samzenpus from the it's-a-little-dry dept.
jage2 writes "Researchers say they have located the world's oldest stash of marijuana in a tomb in a remote part of China. The cache of cannabis is about 2,700 years old and was clearly 'cultivated for psychoactive purposes,' rather than as fibre for clothing, or as food, says a research paper in the Journal of Experimental Botany. The 789 grams of dried cannabis was buried alongside a light-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian man, likely a shaman of the Gushi culture, near Turpan in northwestern China."
Programming

Solving the Knight's Tour Puzzle In 60 Lines of Python 311

Posted by Soulskill from the snakes-and-horsies dept.
ttsiod writes "When I was a kid, I used to play the Knight's Tour puzzle with pen and paper: you simply had to pass once from every square of a chess board, moving like a Knight. Nowadays, I no longer play chess; but somehow I remembered this nice little puzzle and coded a 60-line Python solver that can tackle even 100x100 boards in less than a second. Try beating this, fellow coders!"

Slashdot Top Deals

We gave you an atomic bomb, what do you want, mermaids? -- I. I. Rabi to the Atomic Energy Commission

Close