The Sockets API lets you develop client and server applications that can communicate across a local network or across the world via the Internet. Like any API, you can use the Sockets API in ways that promote high performance -- or inhibit it. This article explores four ways to use the Sockets API to squeeze the greatest performance out your application and to tune the GNU/Linux� environment to achieve the best results.

Boost socket performance on Linux

For gaming manufacturers developing gaming products using the new Best of Breed (BOB) and System to System (S2S) open standards, Digital Dynamics is demonstrating new data scopes to greatly facilitate software and protocol communication development. The data scopes enable developers to easily capture and analyze the following protocol communication layers: TCP/IP, HTTP, SOAP, and S2S/BOB. The data scopes help engineers easily view and dissect all the communications traffic on the slot floor network. The data display can be refined with filters to focus only on specific data that is desired to be reviewed and analyzed.
The message builder tools for the BOB and S2S communication protocols helps software developers quickly construct and validate gaming communications messages to ensure compliance with the GSA's open standard protocol specifications. Developers can use the point and click message building interface to create a BOB or S2S message and send it to the desired recipient. Combined with the data scopes, developers will have incredibly useful tools to facilitate their BOB and S2S software development and protocol compliance testing.

digital dynamics software

ALLIANCE GAMING ANNOUNCES
DEFINITIVE AGREEMENT TO ACQUIRE
SIERRA DESIGN GROUP Marks strategic entry into Class II markets, further develops VLT and central determination product lines and significantly grows systems business

ALLIANCE GAMING ANNOUNCES DEFINITIVE AGREEMENT TO ACQUIRE SIERRA DESIGN GROUP

Seminole Hard Rock Casino Adopts New Standards
4 October 2004


LAS VEGAS – (PRESS RELEASE) -- The Seminole Tribe of Florida has announced it is implementing GSA's landmark Best of Breed (BOB) and System-to-System (S2S) protocols at its Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino and Seminole Casino properties in Florida. The Tribe selected GSA's BOB and S2S standard for the 6,000-game operation because the Tribe wanted to have an open, non-proprietary standard for its casinos.
The implementation required manufacturers to license GSA's standards. BOB and S2S standards are available free of charge to its members and is also available for licensing to non-members.

Seminole Hard Rock Casino Adopts New Standards

Tribal government-sponsored gaming is a relatively new phenomenon dating to the late 1970s when a number of Tribes established bingo operations as a means of raising revenues to fund Tribal government operations. At about the same time a number of state governments were also exploring the potential for increasing state revenues through state-sponsored gaming. By the mid-1980s, a number of states had authorized charitable gaming, and some were sponsoring state-operated lotteries.
Although government-sponsored gaming was an issue of mutual interest,
Tribal and state governments soon found themselves at odds over Indian
gaming. The debate centered on the issue of whether Tribal governments
possess the authority to conduct gaming independently of state regulation.
Although many lower courts affirmed the Tribal view in the early cases,
the matter was not finally resolved until 1987 when the U.S. Supreme
Court confirmed the authority of Tribal governments to establish gaming
operations independent of state regulation provided that the state in
question permits some form of gaming. California v. Cabazon Band of
Mission Indians 480 U.S. 202 (1987).
Congress took up the issue of Tribal gaming and conducted a series
of hearings, ultimately culminating in the passage of the Indian Gaming
Regulatory Act of 1988 (Act). Embodied in the Act was a compromise between
state and Tribal interests. The states were offered a voice in determining
the scope and extent of Tribal gaming by requiring Tribal-State compacts
for Class III gaming, but Tribal regulatory authority over Class II
gaming was preserved in full. The Act further provided for general regulatory
oversight at the federal level and created the National Indian Gaming
Commission as the responsible agency.

Introduction To Tribal Gaming

GSA Standards are available to the general public at no cost. Draft standards will be made available to the general public after the membership has approved them, on this page. Errata sheets detail changes which will be implemented in the next revision of the protocol document. All changes are related to implementation, not function.

Standards - Gaming Standards Association

BANGALORE, India — A professor was killed and four others were wounded at a science conference in India on Wednesday (Dec. 28) by a gunman with possible ties to a terrorist group, according to police.

Police said the gunman sprayed automatic gunfire during a conference at the Indian Institute of Science, based in the southern Indian city of Bangalore. Professor M.C. Puri from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, was killed in the attack, according to police.

Several others were seriously hurt, including Vijay Chandru, founder of the Indian-developed palm-computer, the Simputer, according to a report from the BBC News service.

The Indian Institute of Science is a leading postgraduate college in India's technology hub of Bangalore.

I've previously memed about the TATA Bookhouse at the IIS. This happened right next to it on the idyllic campus there. A damned shame. Murderous sons of bitches. Guess all those armed guards at the gates didn't equal security. I hear they don't even have bullets?

India's Science Institute Attacked By Suspected Terrorists | December 28, 2005

Cornerstone: Visual Thinking
Software for Mapping and Visual Thinking
Cornerstone: Visual Thinking software is designed to complement and echo the way your mind works. It will therefore help you to:
understand and remember new ideas
improve planning and communication
generate better solutions to problems

You can use Cornerstone by yourself, to help you think and learn, and in groups within your company or organisation, to generate new ideas naturally, effortlessly and enjoyably.
Click on the menu to learn more about how Cornerstone: Visual Thinking can help you, your team or your organisation.

Interesting visual teh.

Cornerstone Visual Thinking Software Idea Mapping Software

For those going into the legal profession, and for those curious about the logic of legal procedures, this book offers and excellent introduction. Its length will suit those readers who want a quick but accurate overview of this topic. It might also satisfy the needs of a reader in a field of endeavor somewhat removed from the legal profession, namely, that of artificial intelligence. Artificial and computational intelligence has been applied to the legal profession with the goal of creating automated legal reasoning machines. My interest in the book was somewhat different when I first read it years ago, but now has been reactivated from the standpoint of artificial intelligence. The author describes his book as an attempt to give a general description of the process of legal reasoning in case law and in statutorial and constitutional interpretation. He emphasizes right at the beginning that the law should not be viewed as a known system of rules that are applied by a judge, that legal rules are never clear, and that a requirement for such clarity would make society impossible. Ambiguity in the rules he says, allows collective participation to resolve the ambiguity. Such a characterization of legal rules by Levi prohibits an axiomatic or formal approach to legal reasoning, and this will make the problem of creating automated legal reasoners much more difficult. Interestingly, Levi quotes Aristotle in asserting that the pattern of legal reasoning consists of reasoning by example, and that it follows a three-step process: With the doctrine of precedent assumed throughout, a proposition describing a particular case is made into law and then this rule is applied to a situation that is similar to these. Thus: 1. The cases are shown to be similar. 2. The rule of law in the first case is announced 3. This rule is then applied to the second case. It is the finding of similarity in both cases that would entail, in the context of a legal reasoning machine, the use of data mining techniques coupled with a formalization of the Aristotelian "reasoning by example" that is discussed by Levi. An interesting part of Levi's discussion on the determination of similarity (or difference) is that this determination is dependent on the judge. When a statute does not exist, and case law is being considered, the judge is free to dismiss teh facts that the prior judge may have considered important. The doctrine of "ratio decidendi" in legal philosophy, and has been the subject of intense investigation. A formal or computational model of ratio decidendi must come to terms with this tension between precedent and judicial discretion. In addition, Levi argues, the rules are discovered in the process of determining the similarities (or differences). This dynamism in legal reasoning is not too different from what happens in scientific research, for in the latter new laws (rules) are discovered in the process of interpreting new data that has been acqu... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]

An Introduction to Legal Reasoning: Books

To be a good programmer is difficult and noble.
The hardest part of making real a collective vision
of a software project is dealing with
one's coworkers and customers.
Writing computer programs is important and takes great intelligence
and skill. But it is really child's play compared to
everything else that a good programmer must do to make a
software system that succeeds for both the customer and
myriad colleagues for whom she is partially responsible.
In this essay I attempt to summarize as concisely as possible
those things that I wish
someone had explained to me when I was twenty-one.

This is very subjective and, therefore, this essay is doomed
to be personal and somewhat opinionated. I confine myself to problems that a
programmer is very likely to have to face in her work.
Many of these problems and their solutions are so general to
the human condition that I will probably seem preachy.
I hope in spite of this that this essay will be useful.

How to be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary