This is So Cool!

Starcraft AI Competition!

Lobbing Mortars from Hell

Was reading Phoronix today when I encountered this great quote about S3 graphics:

Personally, S3’s biggest recognition in my life was playing Heavy Gear 2 at a LAN. Some putz was putting mortars on us from way the Hell at the far end of the map with impunity. After allegations of cheating and threats of beating, we all found out his Savage4 didn’t support pretty much any way of rendering distance fog. He had an infinite viewline.

After further allegations of cheating and rigging, we found out that not only did he not intentionally arrange a corner case to get this screwup, there were no drivers from S3 that could fix it, and S3 had stopped making drivers for his card.

Maybe that’s why no one uses S3 video cards.

News Roundup

The best of the last week:

Sci-fi tearjerkers

My personal #1 would be Buffy’s “The Gift”, which makes the list at #5. Many of the other choices should be recognizable by avid sci-fi fans, and if not, should serve notice for you to start watching those. Revisiting this list at times brings back tragic memories of tears shed.

Reality district

On the same vein, District 9 is not just a successful indie sci-fi flick; it’s an allegory for the violence against immigrants in South Africa. It’s somewhat tragic as South Africa has had opportunities to reinvent itself as the Costa Rica of Africa, becoming a beacon of hope and example of successful governance in a continent of poverty and suffering. Corruption and tribal politics have ended Thabo Mbeki’s vision of an African Renaissance.

Dollhouse becomes reality

Sometimes, I don’t what is more strange, sci-fi or Japan. This post sheds light on what has been happening in Japan for some time, and it is not unexpected for what Wayne has termed a “repressed society”. Still, paying for companionship may soon become more popular throughout the world, starting with the US.

Karlovic outdoes himself

Moving on to sports now, Ivo Karlovic serves 78 aces in a 5 set match against Radek Stepanek in the Davis Cup, and loses. He served 55 against Lleyton Hewitt (my fav. tennis player) and lost. Sometimes, you just don’t get into a rhythm when you aren’t involved in sustained rallies. Regardless, serving 78 aces is an incredible accomplishment, almost ensuring that you never lose serve.

What’s in Intel’s closet?

I feel conflicted about this. On one hand, Intel is a leader in technology and is on the forefront of innovation in many areas (compilers, CPUs, GPUs, chipset, IEEE standards, and many others). The company is a heavy contributor to open-source initiatives and has one of the finest Linux graphics drivers excluding Poulsbo. However, I’ve always had this nagging suspicion in the back of my calvarium that they’ve been artificially excluding competition with AMD by paying off OEMs (Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc.) to not build AMD-based computers. Check out what the EU dug up on Intel and the phrases executives used when discussing their payoff.

RMS vs MDI

In the open-source world, Miguel de Icaza has often been castigated, but none more harshly than this remark by Richard Stallman, calling him a traitor to the movement. Most reactions have been critical of Stallman for his harsh language and attempts to purify the community with an absurd witch-hunt. I’ve met de Icaza in person in 2006 at Microsoft’s .NET conference when I worked as an intern there (the same summer that I met Bill Gates, Anders Heljsberg, and Jim Hugunin). He was amazingly focused, energetic, and passionate about certain technologies, not all of which I found to be technically sound. His actions and words were certainly colourful, and often talked trash about competing technologies (XGL vs AIGLX: “How do you pronounce AIGLX?”, .NET vs Java: “No one uses Java anymore.”). Some of that is certainly due to his involvement in a commercial company (Novell) that is carving out a niche marketplace by collaborating with and being friendly to proprietary companies. Despite those issues, I saw nothing disingenuous about his dedication to the open-source community. His brainchild, Mono, is an amazing technical piece of work that should be embraced by the community as bringing more languages and software to our existing pool.

Deficit doomsday prophet

Previously, I’ve expressed disappointment at Obama’s deficit-happy policies. I’m not alone in that worry. This article describes the activities of David Walker in educating the public about the dangers of high and sustained deficits. He wages a lonely crusade against politicians who kick problems down to future generations and against naive voters who demand more benefits and less taxes at the same time.

Banana republic watch

It’s quite the season for doom-and-gloom prophets to emerge from the woodworks. In terms of wealth, Europe has just surpassed North America in terms of assets under wealth management. Sure, it’s not a precise measurement, but it’s worrisome for some seeing that Europe already leads in other categories, such as leisure time, happiness, and HDI.

Speaking of measurements of development, Joseph Stiglitz takes issue with GDP as the preferred measurement of progress. This comes in the wake of (or maybe inspired) Sarkozy’s determined effort to find a new indicator of growth.

Health care addendum (and here)

Here are some articles following up on my earlier post on health care in the US. Greg Mankiw shares the economic basis behind rationing care with a realistic example of what might happen. He lays out rather clearly why we can’t have equal health care for everyone. The other article is by John Tierney and dispels myths of US health care being behind that of other nations in terms of outcomes.

The Best Linux Games

A careful selection of the best games, given my 4 years using Linux.

OSS:
pingus
wormus
nexuiz
wesnoth
supertux
lincity
frozen bubbles
freeciv
freecol

Proprietary:
UT 2004
Neverwinter Nights
ETQW
sid meier alpha centauri
heroes of might and magic III

Windows Native on Wine
warcraft 3 (including all blizzard games)
aoe 2
medieval 2 total war
morrowind
spiderweb software games
baldur’s gate

Epiphany of the Day

Illustrating the birth a new open-source developer:

Hmm… There’s this thing called Linux.
Ubuntu seems to be the distro everyone’s using.
What’s does Debian-based mean?
Gah! I’m fed up with my programs being out of date, let me switch to Fedora.
Fedora’s stability sucks. How about Arch/Gentoo?
Even with the latest program, ___ feature doesn’t exist/work properly.
Hey wait, the source code is available.

Women in CS

A recent article on the NYT reminded me of a glaring issue in academia – gender imbalances in different departments. I do not consider this a social injustice like my liberal arts classmates do; rather, I think it’s a natural reflection of societal pressures and preferences. Like it or not, men are drawn to high-paying, high-pressure situations with minimal social contact. Engineering actually piqued the interests of some rather nerdy math whizzes I knew from high school, offering them a challenge to keep them away from drugs hacking DoD computers. Women, on the other hand, tend to be drawn to more cooperative disciplines that involve dealing with people. So, rather than constantly wonder how to “solve” the problem of a shortage of women in technical fields, let’s attribute it to a societal phenomenon that’s best left alone. After all, why aren’t we trying to solve the shortage of women in American Football or men in English class? Heck, women outnumber men in terms of undergraduate degrees bestowed and we’re not raising a ruckus about that. The cynic in me says that the men probably like it that way.

Some would argue that we are losing perspectives or a diverse set of views. Nonsense. There’s still a baseline 20% women in computers. They could provide the insight. If not, the men in the field who want female input can consult female colleagues, friends, or neighbours.

With that said, we should carefully examine and understand the structural causes of this difference. After all, we know that this difference in preference is not bestowed at birth; countries in Eastern Europe boast much higher proportions of women in technology. In other words, is there something about American culture that causes women to prefer interacting with people, which results in fewer choosing to go into CS.

I had a discussion of this last year with a female classmate in the CS deparment at Berkeley. She said, “we (women) like computers, but not the isolation,” which reinforces my theory that it is the perceived nature of computing that prevents it from becoming attractive to women. That is to say, women are exposed at an early age to images of the technogeek who speaks in l33t and other jargon but sadly lacks social skills; this creates a stereotype of the field as not being conducive for interpersonal interactions.

For other conversations on the matter, I present an old article by Phil Greenspun of MIT way back in 1995 as well as this post with excerpts from papers, well-argued points, and a nice summary of the issue.

News Roundup – Square Root Day Special

It’s square root day! And that doesn’t come around very often.

To start us off, Ginny Brown-Waite, Republican congresswoman from Florida, had this to say about Tim Geithner, “Every time a statement is issued by you, the stock market plummets.” Yikes! We don’t know whether to call that “negative” or “depressin”.

Meghan McCain, the daughter of the presidential candidate, is having trouble finding boys. Not in attracting them, but in finding one who measures up to her own exacting standards. What are they? Well, you can’t have voted for Obama, and you can’t be a rabid Republican. Hm… That just about rules out everyone but the Nader or Barr voters.

Ladies, are you reevaluating your priorities on the dating market given the current economic downturn? Willing to settle for big bucks over a real personality? Well, Melinda Gates is here to tell you that marrying for money isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. She let slip: “Every now and then I look at my friends and say ‘Ooh, I wouldn’t mind having that iPhone.’” Ouch! Steve Jobs circa ‘95 doesn’t look too bad now, eh?

The Best Computer Deals

This is something of a public service announcement for people who are in the business of buying PCs. Actually, even those who build their own computers should consider some of the models I’m about to suggest; I’ve found that there are exceptional price savings that one can’t get with a custom build. Then again, the performance, tweakability, overclockability, and freedom of component choice offered by building from parts from Newegg and ZipZoomfly is something to weigh against a higher price. For some enthusiasts, there is also the matter of personal pride.

Enough of that. Let’s get on to the meat of this post.

My recommendation for a generic desktop would be the cheapest Vostro that is available at the time on Dell Deals for Small Business. The base model at the time is a $399 Vostro 220 Mini. The essentials of the configuration are:

Intel Core 2 Duo E7400 (2.8 GHz, 3MB L2 Cache, 1066 MHz FSB)
3 GB 800 MHz DDR2 RAM
250 GB 7200 RPM Hard Drive
16X DVD +/- RW Drive
Intel X4500HD Graphics (Integrated)
19″ Monitor
That’s an unbeatable deal for a desktop!

For notebook computers, my preference is to go for a well-engineered and long-lasting computer from Lenovo. This is after my two previous consumer-class notebooks experienced various hardware failures after around 3 years (HP and Dell respectively). Lenovo machines are pricier for a given config, but are built like tanks and can last up to 10+ years. They are also thinner, cooler, and lighter than comparable models elsewhere.

To get savings, go to the contractor’s page and log in with a code. At the time of posting, that code is “familyandfriends”.

Anyone Noticed Microsoft’s “I’m a PC” Ads?

And here I was wondering how MS would react to the Mac vs PC ads. Well, apparently there’s a $300 million ad campaign entitled “I’m a PC,” which showcases different “normal” people who use PCs. They were featured a while back on atdhe’s feeds, but I don’t know of any major networks that carried them. One particularly notable one was the hilariously stupid ad entitled “Food,” which is the second video on the main ad site. The BBQ and pancake guys were particularly… dull.

Though I have to say, the latest attempt is quite charming and cute.

Joke of the Day

Courtesy of Slashdot:

For those of you who don’t remember, Intel released a Pentium processor back in 1994 that had a bug or erratum which caused floating point division operations to produce the wrong result. After much denial, Intel recalled the chip en-masse. Now, recalling the humour and taglines from that time:

How many Pentium designers does it take to screw in a light bulb? 1.94
Pentiums and Deodorants – When being close is all that matters
Highlander Pentium: There can be only 1.0101002913491!
Talking Barbie and the Pentium-90 agree! “Math is hard!”
“Go forth and multiply… divide only if not on a Pentium…”
“I am Pentium of Borg–prepare to be approximated”
Pentium: Making tomorrow’s mistakes today
Pentium slogan: Why Do You Think It’s Called *Floating* Point?
Pentium slogan: Nearly 300 correct opcodes!