Just a really quick post because I should be working, but I found this out just today and it’s really very useful. Whenever you get a file that you can’t delete you just want to throttle windows, or the application that’s holding the file under it’s selfish control. Well, you can find out what is holding that file with a wonderful tool called Handle.
It is a command line tool but it’s very easy to use, simply type in the following and you’ll be told (in slightly verbose terms) what has a handle to what:
handle
You will get a lot of output, but you might see something like this
530: File (R–) C:\Documents and Settings\hba\Desktop\Book1.xls
——————————————————————————
This tells us that Excel.exe has a handle on the Book1.xls meaning we can’t do stuff to it. You can make your life easier by using the following command to save the output from Handle so you can go back over it later (the following command saves the output to C:/handle.txt).
handle > C:\handle.txt
There you go then, that’s that, not so technical so sorry about that maybe it’ll do a more in depth one later.
It’s hard to come in contact with Game Theory without coming across The Prisoner’s Dilemma which is a non-zero-sum game played between two people who are seemingly pitted against eachother. The following is the form in which I was introduced to The Prisoner’s Dilemma recently:
Alice and Bob are gangsters in the Chicago of the 1920s. The District Attorney knows that they are guilty of a major crime, but is unable to convict either unless one of them confesses. He orders their arrest, and seperately offers each the following deal:
If you confess and your accomplice fails to confess, then you go free.
If you fail to confess but your accomplice confesses, then you will be convicted and sentence to the maximum term in jail.
If you both confess, then you will both be convicted, but the maximum sentence will not be imposted.
If neither confesses, you will both be framed on a tax evasion charge for which a conviction is certain (but the sentence is not great).
There are then two possibilities for each gangster, either to cooperate with the other gangster, or to betray the other gangster. This for quite some time confused me as I wasn’t sure if cooperate was to cooperate with the police, or to cooperate with the other gangster. We can now build the following matrix for The Prisoner’s Dilemma.
Coop
Betray
Coop
Short
Short
Free
Max
Betray
Max
Free
Long
Long
I’ve used the terms ‘Free’, ‘Short’, ‘Long’ and ‘Max’ to give you an idea of the length of time they will stay in jail for, the only one that needs explanation, I would hope, is ‘Free’ which means they spend no time in jail at all and only occurs if they Betray (Confess) and the other party Cooperates (Stays quiet).
The Dominant Strategies are marked in bold and contrary to what we would like to think, the rational solution is always to betray humanity even though you’d both get a shorter sentence if you both cooperated. This is because if I know you’re going to Cooperate I should always Betray you, that way I get off free, it is my best strategy. It must be noted that this is based on a one off game where we will never meet again and probably have never met in the first place, it makes it more interesting if you change things to say that both parties know eachother and therefore have a reason to cooperate.
I won’t go in to the specifics as I want to talk about Golden Balls which is very interesting, but you can make both players of The Prisoner’s Dilemma have cooperation as their dominant strategy by repeating the game indefinatley. This way if I betray you this time I know you’ll betray me next time and we’ll both just end up betraying each other, so, to save this happening, we both cooperate forever.
After looking in to The Prisoner’s Dilemma a bit more I discovered what most people call a real-world example of The Prisoner’s Dilemma in the final round of a gameshow called Golden Balls. This was a TV game-show that aired on ITV in the United Kingdom in 2007 and was hosted by a comedian called Jasper Carrot. The main workings of the game are unimportant, what matters here is the final round. Each contestant, of which there are two, chooses a ball, either Split, which means they try and split the money or Steal which means they try and steal the money. There are three outcomes as follows:
Both players choose Split:- The winnings are split equally between them.
One player chooses Steal, the other Split:- The player who Stole gets all the money.
Both players choose Steal:- No-one gets any money.
To compare it to The Prisoner’s Dilemma, (1) is the same as both gangsters cooperating and getting a short sentence, (2) is the same as one gangster choosing to betray the other and the other gangster cooperating and (3) is the same as both gangsters betraying eachother and both getting a long sentence. From this we can build a simple table that gives payoffs of 100% for winning all the money, 50% if they split the money and 0% if they don’t get anything.
Split
(coop)
Steal
(betray)
Split
(coop)
50%
50%
100%
0%
Steal
(betray)
0%
100%
0%
0%
The problem is the same as The Prisoner’s Dilemma except it is not quite as pure. This is a one time thing, but the players are in the same room, in fact, they’re looking right at each other, their friends and family are watching and they are given the opportunity to convince the other person of their intention to either Split or Steal. There is more at stake than some money, their reputation amongst all people for one. On top of all of this they have been playing a game for the past half hour and have had the chance to betray eachother already, this is not now a case of a pure game, this is now a case of a sub-game.
The best and most amusing example of this follows in this youtube video. I think, more than anything, this video explains The Prisoner’s Dilemma and why it’s a dilemma and causes so much pain and heartache for so many economists, philosophers, psychologists and humanitarians around the world.
I bought a copy of Wired, the American issue a few days ago and I must say I’m really rather impressed by it. I bought it because of an article it has called The Secret Formula that destroyed Wall Street. It’s all about a formula called the Gaussian copula formula which was, as far as I can make out, used to calculate risk on different kinds of loans from the high end loans only banks deal with to, and more importantly, your regular mortgage. However, I’m really loving my latest purchase of this magazine, it’s got quite a few really interesting articles in it, including one on Watchmen that I have yet to read.
Included in the articles are an article on music games like Rock Band and how the music industry in all its wisdom is pulling support from these games because they don’t give enough in the form of licensing fees and returns. What they’re doing I see as essentially opening up the market for independent music distribution and licensing, giving more variety and freedom to those who want to get their music out there. Think about creating a tune for a game like Rock Band specifically as a band and getting it known through the console, then, when popularity has increased, or even before, sell it over iTunes or some other internet distributer.
Recently I bought a netbook, a Samsung NC10 to be precise, it’s an absolutely fabulous piece of hardware, it runs everything I could really want on the move and I can even code some Assembly on it. I write most of my blog entries on it on my way too and from work and I feel quite proud of it when I pull it out on the tube on the way too or from work. However, there is a point to this, the WIRED issue has an article on Netbooks that really makes you think about the direction the hardware industry for computers is really going. Here, is a netbook, a low cost, low powered, device that can really do anything you want to do on it. If you have an internet connection you don’t even need to worry about installing a word processor on it. There really is no real need for most people to have high performance computers when you can just sit down snug on a char in Starbucks with a netbook and get on with whatever facebooking-myspacing-shenanigans you want. For ages coders have been taking advantage of high powered pcs by coding bloatware, sloware, bulkware, etc and now you have these low powered netbooks that are what we had maybe four years ago in high end laptops and if software developers really want to stay atop of the market they’re going to have to start shaping up and coding better. That’s just my personal opinion on how bad a lot of programs are coded these days though.
Finally, we have the article on the Gaussian Copula Function which I’ll probably write an article on as well as Watchmen. At the moment I’m so impressed with WIRED US that I want to subscribe but I’m going to be waiting to see if the next issue is any good.
We all remember, well, I remember, when Firefox had a wonderful feature that hogged memory like nobodies business. This was to do with the way it cached tabbed browsing and there was, I believe a way to turn it off.
I use firefox for certain sites that I can’t access any other way (continuum, which has a bug in its cookies that Firefox apparently doesn’t handle properly) and I’m ok with it, it does what it’s mean to do (for me), for the most part. However, today I came across this bug which is a problem with the way that Firefox’s anti-phishing works. It basically states that if a file path is being sent to the server through a form it should be truncated so that just the filename is sent and not the full path. What a great feature, all those forms I’m going to fill out with full paths which could be used by phishers (there probably is a usecase), but the real problem comes when you have someone like this guy who clearly needs the standard functionality.
Once again Firefox team haven’t really thought through their ‘feature’ and it’s going to cause them problems with Chrome and Opera being strong contenders. Opera having all the functionality and more of Firefox (without the ability to write complex extensions) and Chrome being the new kid on the block with a whole host of its own problems but the ability to move forward in a way that Firefox doesn’t seem to be able to.
Posted by pintsizedcat 
Posted by pintsizedcat 
Posted by pintsizedcat 