hoopa

What an awesome thought, no internet!!! What I like about the internet: e-mail chat programs video conferencing over long distance forums and general information sharing e-commerce opportunities online gaming media and entertainment massive online communities What I don't like about the internet: Porn Spam Viruses Malicious Hackers Did I mention porn? I think overall, I could not conceive living without the internet. I have just been through a long distance relationship (and we're still together), but perhaps the only thing that kept it going for the last two years was the ability to use video conferencing. My brother now lives in the UK, and I can now still talk to him as easily as if he was in Australia. For all the negatives that I incur in my day to day routine, I can handle those for the numerous benefits that it delivers to me personally. Off the topic, my father once met this guy. He didn't know who he was at the time, but you don't meet people like this everyday of the week. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cailliau He basically had a hand in creating the world wide web. This is someone who (for better or worse) has had an amount of influence on a society that probably no one in history has ever had.

Hi all,Thanks for the numerous responses. From looking at the problem again it seems that the most logical place for this to sit would be the router itself, but I'm not exactly a network specialist so a solution may not get that advanced. I tried ethereal, but couldn't even get the exe to open as it was corrupt, and they had taken down the other mirror sites. I will give the wildpackets demo a try when I get a moment and see if I have any better luck with that one ;)Cheers,Hoopa

WARNING: The following post might just be a ramble Thanks for your interest in the topic, and that's very good point that you make If I had the answer to that question I think I'd be sitting on a beach somewhere with a nice cold beer. (i.e retired) My system does not take into account the player factor, but instead concentrates on the team performance (at this stage). I tend to think of it as a hive type approach where the team can be measured as a working organism. The reason why I don't take this into account are mainly the overhead of collecting the copious amount of statistics produced by each game. Administration overhead is the main reason, but also a line has to be drawn somewhere as more complex conundrums start to creep in. As you will see in a moment, with the sheer number of possibilities, I have drawn the line a team level learning, with the intention to look closer at player level learning sometime in the future. I have actually done a little bit of work around ranking players based on their games stats, but it is still a very imprecise science. I will be the first to admit what you are saying is true. That players have an massive impact on the results of games. As much as teams would not admit it, the loss of even one key player can cause a teams structure to fall apart, but how do you measure who that key player is? In this sort of system, fact is everything. You can collect stats, but then how do you work out which ones are important? You can't run them through a neural network as you need to know the outputs to train on. The only indicator that you have of how good a player actually is the opinion of other people, and then that can easily be biased. How do you statistically work out who was the most important player from a game? A defender may not score much, but he may stop a lot of goals. Is he more of less important than an attacker who scored a lot of goals? This leads to questions of which players stats are important, which are not, and which are important, but which of those are more important than the other important one? Another complicating factor is injured players. If one of these key players is injured during a game, there is nothing that can predict that (perhaps) and that will always throw your results out. The number of variables in predicting the outcome of a game of football is almost endless. Imagine if you will other factors that could influence a game. The weather (wind, rain, night, day) The playing surface The opposing team/players The crowd (to a degree, but it would exist) The mental state of the players The umpires (humans) and mistakes and biases that might exist If a team is traveling to play a game Rest time from the last game The physical condition of the players (any unknown injuries or pre-conditions) This is an issue that pains me, as I know there is a gaping hole in my logic, but the ability to solve these sort riddles lies just outside of my fingers. Cheers, Hoopa

The green line is hand drawn line is just my take on what the full curve would mature too given enough time (i.e. I think that as the number consecutive wins moves past a point, the amount of wins will start to decrease at an increasing rate, until it reaches 0. It's just really badly drawn because I have no drawing skills (and it was done in a rush to prove a point once, and it's stuck around since then). The only parameter in this equation is the number of consecutive wins by a team at any given point in time (e.g. right now a team might have won there last ten games, so from this you might deduce that their chances of continuing to win are better than their chances of losing. Of course, this is only a very basic model of predicting outcomes. I have trained a neural network on this data and it learns the pattern fine, but it is not necessarily a good indicator of the winning team as there are many other factors to consider. I hope to do more modeling to find more patterns and hopefully by training the neural network on a combination of these models, it can build up a more solid model than any one of them on their own. Edit: yes, there is a formula for the best fit (red line), but it's just something like the average over 3 or 4 values on the x-axis

Hi all,Does anyone know of any bandwidth monitoring software for a LANs? I have seen utilities for gateway servers, but I need a utility that I can use from my PC (one of the nodes on the LAN). Even some sort of traffic monitor would probably suffice for what I'm after, but I haven't been able to find anything suitable.Cheers,Hoopa

Cool, thanks for the link. I think I had seen something like this for Vista, but I was not aware that anything was available for XP. The odd thing about it is that it's picked up a few applications that I had running in the system tray that were not previously in the alt+tab applications list.

Thanks for that guys. That will give me something to go on now. This work is being done as part of my job, and I suspect for the time being I will be stuck with v2.0 until we can get the newer versions of Firefox approved through security. I'm not sure if it matters, but a large component of what I'm working with involves the XForms plugin for Firefox. From what you guys are saying it may not be the parser. I have access to FormsPlayer for IE and another XForms viewer so I might try some tests with those and see how things go.Cheers,Hoopa

I don't know anything about the Quran, but if this is true then that is pretty impressive before you put a god into the context of that sort of knowledge. Not wanting to pick on your religion, but I think some of your logic needs expanding to make it a little more water tight. So, some of my questions are: (some of these might be obvious, I just know nothing about the Quran): How you know this knowledge was first stated 1400 years ago? Has the Quran changed in the last 1400 years? Do you know who wrote the Quran? How can you prove God was the source of that information? An interesting article I just read on wikipedia. I'm not going to put wikipedia as a reference,as I have no idea who put this content in, but Im guessing they know more than I do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliocentrism Cheers, Hoopa

Hi all,Does anyone know where I can get hold of performance stats on how long Firefox take to open really large websites (like > 500k of xhtml). I have done some initial tests with a page of around 1MB and found that Firefox just stops for about 5mins while it gets over the shock. I could go though and test a lot more combinations, but I hoping to find some performance tests that show the point where Firefox starts to degrade.Cheers,Hoopa

<sniff> Napster, those were the good ol' days. I don't personally think Limewire was anything special, but they don't deserve to be targeted anymore than other companies. Something says to me that piracy is wrong, but if things were at a more affordable price then perhaps people would be encouraged to pay a little more often.

Thanks for the comments Jimmy. I have just put in a request to have my site hosted here, so with a bit of time & luck permitting I should have a little bit up soon to show to people. For the mean time here is a little something that others have found interesting. For anyone who ever watched sport, I expect you may have heard the term "a team is due for a win", meaning that they haven't won in a while and must surely win soon. Well, I went on step further and graphed that concept given past results. The picture that I have attached shows how often teams win after x consecutive wins. Conversely, the negative side is how often a team wins after x number of losses. The red line is the best fit for that data, and the green line is my rough approximation of what the actual curve would look like (given a long enough period of time) p.s. I took a look at ur site before the Girlfriend 7.0 helpdesk call is a little gem

I think Habbles comment make the most sense. Why restrict our selfs to what is just on earth. I hope so. I think the thoery that life on earth originated from another planet is a nice theory (no matter how possible). Man, wouldn't we look stupid if we had been looking for aliens all this time, and it turns out that we are the aliens. I think we would encounter one of two sorts of 'aliens'. One would be so far advanced that we'd look like mould growing on some rock, and the other would be mould growing on a rock. Either would be just as good, as long as the first one didn't decide to clean the rock Do I think we'll ever meet aliens? No, I personally think we'll take a blow torch to the rock long before they get here My personal interest is artificial intelligence, and I wonder if anyone would consider AI (if it became self aware) to be an alien life form?

Can't fault that logic. If you use conditioning to associate something bad with an action or an object then over time a person (animal even) might become afraid of it. I could see how people could get a bad impression of Fridays if someone just came along and killed their saviour on a Friday. An experiment that a friend described to me. Several monkeys in a cage. In the cage was a ladder. At the top of the ladder was a bananna. When the monkeys when to take the bananna, they were sprayed with a fire hose. Over time the monkeys learnt not try and take the bananna or they would be sprayed. Another monkey was added. He then went for the bananna, and the other monkeys dragged him back because they knew what was going to happen. The new monkey learnt that the bananna was a bad thing. Over time the monkeys were rotated out of the cage until none of the original monkeys remained. Another monkey was added. He then went for the bananna, and the other monkeys dragged him back, despite the fact none of them had ever actually been sprayed

I think I have the worlds oldest gaming console here somewhere. It had two controllers that consisted of a stick and a button hardwired to the console, it had a cartridge a bit like a Super Nintendo, but that was also hardwired into the console (i.e. that was the only one you could ever use!!). And, one of the few games on that cartridge was pong. I'll see if can find it and post a pic.

Wow, I should have expected that this would be a long thread. Before I get onto the actual topic of 'does god exist?', a couple of points.To everyone here who has mentioned evolution / Darwinism, has ANYONE actually read Charles Darwins Origin of Species paper? I'm in the process of reading it just because I wanted to see what the man himself thought. Interestingly one of his remarks was that while he believed that the thoery of evolution explained a lot that was not previously understood, but that it did not explain everything. Before people jump up and down and go "see, evolution doesn't work", one such example is the concept of mutation. From my understanding mutation was a concept add to biology after Darwin's time. You can see in Darwin's paper remarks at this concept, but he didn't understand what it was that allowed species to skip ahead sometimes. For those who have claimed that there is no evidence of the transitional state creatures as shown by evolution:1. Firstly, read my first comment again2. Take your hand and touch your face. You are now touching one of those transitional creatures. There are no fixed states in evolution. Thats what evolution is!!!! It's always changing!!!JUST BECAUSE WE DON'T UNDERSTAND HOW SOMETHING HAPPENS, DOESN'T MEAN THAT THERE ISN'T A REASON.I think no, God does not exist. I think there may be something/ some event that started everything, but I do not know what. I do not think there is some guy with a white beard (or a guy with a pitchfork) waiting for me when I die. Humans are a scared species that has just enough brains to be dangerous. What humans do not understand, they fear. I think finding a reason for something strange is just a natural reaction to things we don't understand. How else do you explain multiple religions around the world which really have no bearing on each other (Christian, Greek, Ancient Egyptian, Australian Aboriginals, Incas). Common themes in religions are birth, death, the creation of the world, natural phenonena (lightning, floods etc.). They sometime have positive aspects, such as perhaps a closer community aspect, but they must also take blame for countless deaths in history as well.For as much as we think we (humans) know, there is still mountains of concepts that we are yet to wrap our stupid heads around. I have seen comments to the effect of "it's easier to understand god created humans rather than that some rock changed into a single celled organism". I'm afraid that if people were to not ask hard questions like these, we would still think the world is flat.Lastly, I appologise if I have offended anyone. This was not my intent. I simply get frustrated when people start talking about things they do not understand

Hi all,I'm new to these forums, so I thought I'd introduce myself and explain my little project at the same time. I have to admit that part of the reason for joining these forums was get my system (see below) hosted again after my last host just vanished on me. the fact I could post for my hosting, and that it was an IT forum as well just had me hooked.In my spare time I work on a project that I call Punter. Punter is an artificial neural network that has been designed to analyse AFL (Australian Football League) games, and predict the outcome of the games by learning the patterns in the game data. I'm guessing that Xisto.com is not in Australia, but here what we call tipping (picks in the US) is pretty popular. After studying neural networks as part of my honours thesis, I embarked on this system. It is by no means the only system like this, but it was the challenge for me to see if I could build something to the same capability of the more professional systems.I won't go into the intricacies of this system right at the moment, but suffice to say it's still a work in progress. I would point you to my site to show my results, but it kind of doesn't exist at the moment . Another reason for this post was to spark comment on a system like this, and to see if there were any like minded people trawling these forums, so feel free to let me know what you think.Cheers,Hoopa