Forgot your password?

Comment: Re:Is chess solved, or were these guys midlevel? (Score 1) 295

by jmdc (#35618716) Attached to: Top French Chess Players Suspended For Cheating

Apparently these are grandmaster level players being accused.

Your comment intrigued me, so I googled chess program strength. The impression that I got was that chess programs have gotten significantly better in just the past few years at evaluating the strength of a position, allowing them to be very aggressive in pruning the search tree.

This is pulled from wikipedia:



Life Found In Deepest Layer of Earth's Crust 335

Posted by Soulskill
from the gabbroic-added-to-spellchecker dept.
michaelmarshall writes "For the first time, life has been found in the gabbroic layer of the crust. The new biosphere is all bacteria, as you might expect, but they are different from the bacteria in the layers above; they mostly feed on hydrocarbons that are produced by abiotic reactions deep in the crust. It could mean that similar microbes are living even deeper, perhaps even in the mantle."

Comment: Re:I don't really get all the Vista hatred (Score 1) 692

by jmdc (#23528706) Attached to: Ballmer Says Vista Selling Really Well
I'm one of the people who don't use it that rip on it. However, I'm not totally unreasonable. My impression is that Vista is basically XP with the addition of
  1. DirectX10
  2. UAC
  3. Aero
I don't want any of those features. since
  1. I don't play games, but even if I did, I've seen more than one article critical of the performance, quality and cost - here's an example: http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/09/0244212
  2. You yourself turned off UAC, and
  3. Aero is pretty, but I probably don't need video hardware that can run it for anything else (I spend almost all my time in emacs and a web browser, so I never waste money on a powerful video card) So the choice is either turn it off or spend a lot on unnecessary hardware
What it boils down to is I would turn off all the new features that I know of in Vista. If I'm going to do that, I might as well run XP (If I have to run windows that is). Since you're happy with vista, I'd be interested to know what new features you use. Thanks in advance.
