Wasn't the nifty about Crusoe that the actual processor interface was all microcode, that it could emulate anything? Why not Apples with Crusoes in them?
You can build your NAS on an old Linux box, without a doubt. My understanding is that using plain vanilla NFS with ext3 or similar is not going to get you the performance that a NAS appliance would.
Basically, the appliances use special filesystems and NVRAM along with retuned NFS in order to squeeze out the speed - to the point where some NAS is faster than local storage.
How much of this is available OSS, I wonder? Are there any NAS-ready filesystems out there? quickNFS? What about NVRAM cards/mbs and NFS to work with them?
Um, because astronomy is usually so, like, boring, you know? All that stuff, like so far, like, out there. It has like no effect on my life. Like, astrology is totally what's important - cuz, like, I'm a Taurus, and I'm like so a Taurus.
Until an asteroid is about to destroy the Earth, and then it does have an impact (pun intended). Until its not going to actually going to hit the Earth.
So, that's why they jump the gun. It's the only way astronomers can still pretend to be physicists and get funding and whatnot - or at least convince funders that they're just as important.
Let's get this straight. You read this book, that was slanted against caffeine, that said, essentially, no one can find anything of benefit from caffeine, and some studies can find potential problems from cronic intake.
Were you consuming caffeine because it was cool? Or maybe you were consuming caffeine because it's a mild stimulant, and can aid in focus and in staving off sleep. So, in point of fact, there is a benefit to caffeine, so long as it isn't overused.
On the one hand, I'm failing to see your point about this book that scared you off caffeine, and on the other, I'm upset that you could be scared off caffiene and describe yourself as "quite rational."
In what really ought to be called the Slashdot Effect, I've just read 50 or so comments where the most useful 5% all said the same thing: if you're writing a game or streaming video, use UDP, otherwise stick to TCP. But, what bugs me is that this is a very narrow view of the differences between the two protocols.
Frankly, the single most important use of UDP is for sending singleton datagrams. Not to be pissy but, um... duh. Consider how DNS works: queries are sent as UDP, and if the reponse is small enough it goes back in a UDP packet. If it's too big, it's sent as a TCP stream. Prime example of what UDP is good for.
Frankly, as far as UDP streams are concerned, I've never found a use for them that didn't involve a realtime response on the receiving end. Network gaming and video streaming is one idea, but certain kinds of telecontrol are another.
The thing that bugs me most is that, by trade I am not a network programmer. I have done network stuff in the past, but it upsets me that the sum of information in all the commentary on Slashdot is more and more frequently less than I already knew about the topics.
Well, to be fair, Spielberg did a good job on Minority Report
Damn. "Being fair" is about the only reason I'd say Speilberg did a good job on the Minority Report. I saw MR about two weeks after it was out. I'd heard a lot of good things about it, that it was very timely with its attacks on the invasion of privacy angle. I'd specifically gone back and read the Dick story. Then I went to see it.
Give me A.I. any day. Speilbergs Minority Report sucked balls. On three points:
Conformance to the Dick story. Bzzzt. Speilberg's Minority Report was as good a rendition of Dick's story as the Johnny Depp From Hell was of the Alan Moore novel - stuff from the original showed up on screen, but a very cerebral work got decapitated. What's especially sad is that it isn't impossible to do brainy movie that can't be enjoyed without thinking about it. Chritopher McQuarrie is superb at this.
Social commentary. Let's face it, the invasion of privacy by authoritarian entities was done better in (I gag saying this) Imposter, which blew chunks but the main character was constantly tracked by his weird implants. Geeks see it in Minority Report, but everyone else just sees how anyone talking breakfast cereal would be.
Internal consistancy. As in none at all. The end of the original release Blade Runner made more sense than most of the crap in Minority Report. I mean, the electromotive commuter cars that don't move fast enough to ruffle Tom Cruise's hair? In a world that still has wheeled vehicles? That come out of the factory fully feuled? This is not a well reasoned future. It's techno-glitz in service to a goofy Speilberg action flick.
And I guess that kind of summarizes my revulsion towards Minority Report. It's too much akin to a lovely, innocent Harvard graduate finding that the only way she can support herself is to be pimped out of a Safeway loading dock to johns who don't care for conversation.
For my money, go see Lilo & Stitch. It's an ET for the aughts.
This is slightly off topic, but what in the Sam Hell is a "tuit?" The first time it looked like a typo, but the second time you used the word it seems you meant it. And your usage suggests that you're trying to use the word "tuits," so WTF is it supposed to mean?
But a lot of programs are fine from the start and profiling them is a waste.
I agree that profiling isn't always necessary, and that sometimes profiling and optimization won't reap any advantage, but I think the range between not necessary and useless is wide, and the advantage from profiling in that range is subtle but existant.
Additionally, profiling can serve other purposes. It's been suggested that, under a unit testing regime, a coder new to a project can serve as a "Malicious Coder," whose job it is to add bugs to code to catch out situations the unit tests miss. The advantage is that this can improve the testing as well as bringing up a new team member quickly. Profiling/optimization tasks can serve a similar purpose. By giving a direction to code investigation, it speeds the acquisition of familiarity with the code.
If you're writing some code to convert one image to a GIF and you run it successfully to get the GIF, there's no reason to unit test. Even if the code has horrible bugs on some inputs, the job is done.
Um, but...I think there's a confusion of context occurring. The situation you describe happens when you're writing little chunks of one-off code to perform one task and be done with. Usually it'll be used once, or is part of a stopgap "until there's a real solution." If you're producing a product - if an entity external to your workplace is paying money for what you're producing, then you code isn't good without testing; and if you've got some spare cycles going on, profiling isn't too bad either. Something for a Malicious Coder to do when he's bored of adding bugs.
I'd even argue you have the same moral obligation to produce the same level of quality (in terms of well tested and possibly profiled code) if entities outside your workplace will use your software. Just because it was free doesn't mean it should suck.
Do you really think that having people buy the X-Box as a cheap Linux machine is that bad for them?
Now, when I think of Linux on XBox (LinuXBox?), I immediately think server-farm and data center apps. Snap up 100 XBoxen for 20,000, put linux on them all, roll out a web service cluster. Plans on the internet means that at least 1 other person does the same thing...and Microsoft loses 20,000USD every time. I can't see how they'd like this aspect much.
You know, I posted to a fairly dumb Ask Slashdot, not expecting to have to defend my flippant remarks from all and sundry. Okay, round two:
Do you know what NP-hard means?
Strictly speaking, yes, I do know. I also know that path search is, strictly speaking, NP-complete, and so no worse that exponential. I also tend to use the non-academic's (admittedly) lazy shorthand of NP to mean anything in the NP set of complexity. Certainly, P is a subset of NP, but if I knew the problem was P I would have said P, n'est pas? Secondly, even though I say that the problem is NP doesn't mean that anyone can prove that it isn't P, yet.
Finally, without more work on the problem, neither of us can definitively say what the time complexity of this particular problem is - while it's almost certainly exponential, the exponent might be quite small, so that 400 staff might be well within the feasible solution range. However, theoretical and imperical limits should probably be put on the use of the system, and every optimization possible applied. I still laud the suggestion of reusing last week's data as a basis for todays.
As far as overlap goes, my feeling is this: they've been told to switch to digital and have a new station for free. If they say "we can't afford digital," well, you get what you pay for. Their current arrangement is becoming obsolete, and they're refusing to invest in an upgrade. I don't think the broadcasters are really entitled to their current situation.
This looks like a path finding problem to you? You can connect all the nodes (ie timerequests) together in some meaningful way AND you have a function that always returns a weight less than the sum of the path?
Yes, this does look like a path finding problem to me. Every unit of time (your example used days, but more likely we're talking about hour/position combination) needs to be filled. Sort them arbitrarily (honestly, for optimization, you probably want to sort them from fewest options to most.) The goal state is every block being filled. The path between nodes is assigning a worker to a time/position block.
So, now it's defined as a path searching problem. As far as a heuristic goes, I'm not sure I can provide on that's necessarily h*(), so you may be right: it might not be an A* problem, but I think some h() might be found for a best-first search, and that the choice of that heuristic could lead to a system that is fair to everyone. For instance, an open node that involves assigning work to someone over the ideal number of hours (either in a local preference kind of way, or in a global fairness kind of way) sorts lower than someone under the ideal hours, for instance. Similarly, workers with high availability sort lower than low availablity workers (since they're more valuable in filling time blocks.)
Incidentally, how did you think Prolog solved this problem? Quite apart from responding to an algorithmic suggestion with a programming language, Prolog has to do something along these lines behind the scenes. And while I'll freely admit that my academic programming was done with Scheme, Lisp and Verilog (for variety), I wouldn't expect much in the performance arena from Prolog, mostly from the complaints of my colleges. As a result, it might not be the best solution for 400+ student employees.
On the other hand, it sounds like it would be quick to test it out, and if it works, the job's nearly done. If it doesn't it can be abandoned for C or C++ with some nice design.
Parting shot: whether it's a job for Prolog or a best-first search in C, it's still not a very good candidate for the more difficult to code and understand genetic algorithms, from which you can't even guarantee a result.
I'm not sure I see any rational argument to stay in that band of UHF. I mean, UHF starts at Channel 13! Is there any local where everything from 13 to 52 is full? And the move would make UHF that much cooler a cult film, since the battleground wouldn't exist any more.
IMO, though, the FCC shouldn't be requiring that the current spectrum holders go digital. They should change their licenses to empty channels below 52 at no cost, but make the switch manditory. It's malarky like this that makes the FCC a pox on the States.
I've figured out what Mr. John's problem really is. From the other replies, it seems that other/.ers had the same question I did, which is "Why does he think that timetable resolution is a GA problem?" and then it struck me: he has a degree in AI, and so has probably read a lot about genetic algorithms.
IIRC, most GA papers use either elevator control or personnel scheduling as example problems, much like many OO texts use bookstores. Therefore, Mr. John has come to believe that personnel scheduling is best solved by GA.
At least, so I hypothesize. It seems like a fairly straightforward A* search problem to me, although the suggestion of working from previous schedules and just fixing what needs fixing as opposed to starting from scratch is a good suggestion.
Additionally, so what if it is NP? Frankly, if it took an employee a day to do, the machine should have at least 24 hours to work on the data to come to a solution, which is intuitively more than reasonable. Sure, initially fan out is large, but the more restrictions students give the more fan out diminishes as you decend the solution tree. Honestly, you've got a pretty interesting heuristic to write, IMO.
Granted, you didn't ask for/.'s attention, but you did publish in every format but LaTex your description of an engineering feat on par with, oh, say a box propped up with a stick with a string attached for trapping rabbits, only to conclude "oh, and I can't tell that it works."
Honestly, it seems like it must have taken more time to doccument your thing than to build it.
So, on the one hand, that's your good natured fellow-if-anonymous geek ribbing for tooting a very tiny horn so loudly. OTOH, props if you write your own damn utility to check that toy project works.
"I could not find any DMI applications for linux, so I have no way of testing it to see if it worked..."
So, beyond the dubious importance of this "design" - which begins with setting up copper contacts on the case and moving on to pressure switches - he can't give us any results because he doesn't have a utility to check the register.
That's classic.
Two bits says this made it to the front page because he mentions he's running linux on his "CIDS."
Now, IANAL, but skimming the judgement presented in the article, all I can see is that the court has affirmed the defendant's demand of a binding arbitration. The demand was based on a clause in the EULA, but as far as I can tell, BlackSnow hasn't lost, yet.
On the other hand, does the judge's admitting that Mythic is owed an arbitration amount to blessing the contractual status of the EULA? Or is that still in question?
But if they were forced to actually use contract law, and software purchase would be an actual contract negotiation. I think your assertion that EULA's would remain the state of affairs is disengineous.
An actual contract has to be signed before money is exchanged, AFAIK, but IANAL. There's also supposed to be the option of making changes to a contract before you agree to it. There's much talk about how the first EULA to actually be challenged will lose on the grounds that it was presented after the purchase of the software, that it brooks no alteration, and that there's no signature on the document - no proof of the identity of the signer.
I think you're right about lawyers have a field day. But it really would last about 24 hours.
I know a guy who dreams of storing his secret data on 8.5" floppies, on the grounds that there aren't drives to read them with. We tried to tell him otherwise; for instance: you'll need a drive to write your secrets - why not just use that one? He just says "Yeah, I know. But dude!"
IANAL, but my understanding is that while lockpicks are not technically illegal without a locksmithing license, they do make it very easy to toss "intent to break and enter" or some such (possibly even burglary) onto any arrest if you're carrying lockpicks at the time.
Re:So many books on java...
on
Bitter Java
·
· Score: 2
My recommendation is Just Java, by Peter van der Linden. (It feels weird to be admitting to being a "big fan" of the author of programming texts, but he writes a good text.) The style is clear and concise, treats you like an equal rather than like an idiot, but puts things in casual terms, rather than in deep argot.
Oh, and if you need a C text, Deep C Secrets kicks much buttock as well.
Who hasn't noticed that housecats sound like the cries of babies? (There's some thought that this is part of the "stealing babies' breath" myth.) There's been a lot of research that suggests that humans are hardwired not to be able to ignore the cry of a baby, and it seems resonable that housecats might have hooked onto that long ago.
I've noticed several times how a cat will adapt to be more and more attention grabbing as time goes on, and how her housemates will learn particularly effective behavior quite rapidly.
This may sound absurbly sick, in a "you know what they do to your type inside?" kind of way, but:
How can I get on that programming team? Talk about a tricky problem. Especially since, it seems like the ultimate goal should be to move the target demographic up the age scale. Wouldn't you be tempted to look into the product suggested to the witty and entertaining new "friend" you met over IM? Come on, really.
Slashdot Mirror
Wasn't the nifty about Crusoe that the actual processor interface was all microcode, that it could emulate anything? Why not Apples with Crusoes in them?
Basically, the appliances use special filesystems and NVRAM along with retuned NFS in order to squeeze out the speed - to the point where some NAS is faster than local storage.
How much of this is available OSS, I wonder? Are there any NAS-ready filesystems out there? quickNFS? What about NVRAM cards/mbs and NFS to work with them?
Until an asteroid is about to destroy the Earth, and then it does have an impact (pun intended). Until its not going to actually going to hit the Earth.
So, that's why they jump the gun. It's the only way astronomers can still pretend to be physicists and get funding and whatnot - or at least convince funders that they're just as important.
Let's get this straight. You read this book, that was slanted against caffeine, that said, essentially, no one can find anything of benefit from caffeine, and some studies can find potential problems from cronic intake.
Were you consuming caffeine because it was cool? Or maybe you were consuming caffeine because it's a mild stimulant, and can aid in focus and in staving off sleep. So, in point of fact, there is a benefit to caffeine, so long as it isn't overused.
On the one hand, I'm failing to see your point about this book that scared you off caffeine, and on the other, I'm upset that you could be scared off caffiene and describe yourself as "quite rational."
Case not made.
Frankly, the single most important use of UDP is for sending singleton datagrams. Not to be pissy but, um... duh. Consider how DNS works: queries are sent as UDP, and if the reponse is small enough it goes back in a UDP packet. If it's too big, it's sent as a TCP stream. Prime example of what UDP is good for.
Frankly, as far as UDP streams are concerned, I've never found a use for them that didn't involve a realtime response on the receiving end. Network gaming and video streaming is one idea, but certain kinds of telecontrol are another.
The thing that bugs me most is that, by trade I am not a network programmer. I have done network stuff in the past, but it upsets me that the sum of information in all the commentary on Slashdot is more and more frequently less than I already knew about the topics.
Maybe Bruce Perens is right.
Only if you're a pansy.
Damn. "Being fair" is about the only reason I'd say Speilberg did a good job on the Minority Report. I saw MR about two weeks after it was out. I'd heard a lot of good things about it, that it was very timely with its attacks on the invasion of privacy angle. I'd specifically gone back and read the Dick story. Then I went to see it.
Give me A.I. any day. Speilbergs Minority Report sucked balls. On three points:
And I guess that kind of summarizes my revulsion towards Minority Report. It's too much akin to a lovely, innocent Harvard graduate finding that the only way she can support herself is to be pimped out of a Safeway loading dock to johns who don't care for conversation.
For my money, go see Lilo & Stitch. It's an ET for the aughts.
This is slightly off topic, but what in the Sam Hell is a "tuit?" The first time it looked like a typo, but the second time you used the word it seems you meant it. And your usage suggests that you're trying to use the word "tuits," so WTF is it supposed to mean?
I agree that profiling isn't always necessary, and that sometimes profiling and optimization won't reap any advantage, but I think the range between not necessary and useless is wide, and the advantage from profiling in that range is subtle but existant.
Additionally, profiling can serve other purposes. It's been suggested that, under a unit testing regime, a coder new to a project can serve as a "Malicious Coder," whose job it is to add bugs to code to catch out situations the unit tests miss. The advantage is that this can improve the testing as well as bringing up a new team member quickly. Profiling/optimization tasks can serve a similar purpose. By giving a direction to code investigation, it speeds the acquisition of familiarity with the code.
Um, but...I think there's a confusion of context occurring. The situation you describe happens when you're writing little chunks of one-off code to perform one task and be done with. Usually it'll be used once, or is part of a stopgap "until there's a real solution." If you're producing a product - if an entity external to your workplace is paying money for what you're producing, then you code isn't good without testing; and if you've got some spare cycles going on, profiling isn't too bad either. Something for a Malicious Coder to do when he's bored of adding bugs.
I'd even argue you have the same moral obligation to produce the same level of quality (in terms of well tested and possibly profiled code) if entities outside your workplace will use your software. Just because it was free doesn't mean it should suck.
Now, when I think of Linux on XBox (LinuXBox?), I immediately think server-farm and data center apps. Snap up 100 XBoxen for 20,000, put linux on them all, roll out a web service cluster. Plans on the internet means that at least 1 other person does the same thing...and Microsoft loses 20,000USD every time. I can't see how they'd like this aspect much.
Strictly speaking, yes, I do know. I also know that path search is, strictly speaking, NP-complete, and so no worse that exponential. I also tend to use the non-academic's (admittedly) lazy shorthand of NP to mean anything in the NP set of complexity. Certainly, P is a subset of NP, but if I knew the problem was P I would have said P, n'est pas? Secondly, even though I say that the problem is NP doesn't mean that anyone can prove that it isn't P, yet.
Finally, without more work on the problem, neither of us can definitively say what the time complexity of this particular problem is - while it's almost certainly exponential, the exponent might be quite small, so that 400 staff might be well within the feasible solution range. However, theoretical and imperical limits should probably be put on the use of the system, and every optimization possible applied. I still laud the suggestion of reusing last week's data as a basis for todays.
As far as overlap goes, my feeling is this: they've been told to switch to digital and have a new station for free. If they say "we can't afford digital," well, you get what you pay for. Their current arrangement is becoming obsolete, and they're refusing to invest in an upgrade. I don't think the broadcasters are really entitled to their current situation.
Yes, this does look like a path finding problem to me. Every unit of time (your example used days, but more likely we're talking about hour/position combination) needs to be filled. Sort them arbitrarily (honestly, for optimization, you probably want to sort them from fewest options to most.) The goal state is every block being filled. The path between nodes is assigning a worker to a time/position block.
So, now it's defined as a path searching problem. As far as a heuristic goes, I'm not sure I can provide on that's necessarily h*(), so you may be right: it might not be an A* problem, but I think some h() might be found for a best-first search, and that the choice of that heuristic could lead to a system that is fair to everyone. For instance, an open node that involves assigning work to someone over the ideal number of hours (either in a local preference kind of way, or in a global fairness kind of way) sorts lower than someone under the ideal hours, for instance. Similarly, workers with high availability sort lower than low availablity workers (since they're more valuable in filling time blocks.)
Incidentally, how did you think Prolog solved this problem? Quite apart from responding to an algorithmic suggestion with a programming language, Prolog has to do something along these lines behind the scenes. And while I'll freely admit that my academic programming was done with Scheme, Lisp and Verilog (for variety), I wouldn't expect much in the performance arena from Prolog, mostly from the complaints of my colleges. As a result, it might not be the best solution for 400+ student employees.
On the other hand, it sounds like it would be quick to test it out, and if it works, the job's nearly done. If it doesn't it can be abandoned for C or C++ with some nice design.
Parting shot: whether it's a job for Prolog or a best-first search in C, it's still not a very good candidate for the more difficult to code and understand genetic algorithms, from which you can't even guarantee a result.
IMO, though, the FCC shouldn't be requiring that the current spectrum holders go digital. They should change their licenses to empty channels below 52 at no cost, but make the switch manditory. It's malarky like this that makes the FCC a pox on the States.
IIRC, most GA papers use either elevator control or personnel scheduling as example problems, much like many OO texts use bookstores. Therefore, Mr. John has come to believe that personnel scheduling is best solved by GA.
At least, so I hypothesize. It seems like a fairly straightforward A* search problem to me, although the suggestion of working from previous schedules and just fixing what needs fixing as opposed to starting from scratch is a good suggestion.
Additionally, so what if it is NP? Frankly, if it took an employee a day to do, the machine should have at least 24 hours to work on the data to come to a solution, which is intuitively more than reasonable. Sure, initially fan out is large, but the more restrictions students give the more fan out diminishes as you decend the solution tree. Honestly, you've got a pretty interesting heuristic to write, IMO.
Granted, you didn't ask for /.'s attention, but you did publish in every format but LaTex your description of an engineering feat on par with, oh, say a box propped up with a stick with a string attached for trapping rabbits, only to conclude "oh, and I can't tell that it works."
Honestly, it seems like it must have taken more time to doccument your thing than to build it.
So, on the one hand, that's your good natured fellow-if-anonymous geek ribbing for tooting a very tiny horn so loudly. OTOH, props if you write your own damn utility to check that toy project works.
So, beyond the dubious importance of this "design" - which begins with setting up copper contacts on the case and moving on to pressure switches - he can't give us any results because he doesn't have a utility to check the register.
That's classic.
Two bits says this made it to the front page because he mentions he's running linux on his "CIDS."
On the other hand, does the judge's admitting that Mythic is owed an arbitration amount to blessing the contractual status of the EULA? Or is that still in question?
An actual contract has to be signed before money is exchanged, AFAIK, but IANAL. There's also supposed to be the option of making changes to a contract before you agree to it. There's much talk about how the first EULA to actually be challenged will lose on the grounds that it was presented after the purchase of the software, that it brooks no alteration, and that there's no signature on the document - no proof of the identity of the signer.
I think you're right about lawyers have a field day. But it really would last about 24 hours.
I know a guy who dreams of storing his secret data on 8.5" floppies, on the grounds that there aren't drives to read them with. We tried to tell him otherwise; for instance: you'll need a drive to write your secrets - why not just use that one? He just says "Yeah, I know. But dude!"
IANAL, but my understanding is that while lockpicks are not technically illegal without a locksmithing license, they do make it very easy to toss "intent to break and enter" or some such (possibly even burglary) onto any arrest if you're carrying lockpicks at the time.
Oh, and if you need a C text, Deep C Secrets kicks much buttock as well.
I've noticed several times how a cat will adapt to be more and more attention grabbing as time goes on, and how her housemates will learn particularly effective behavior quite rapidly.
How can I get on that programming team? Talk about a tricky problem. Especially since, it seems like the ultimate goal should be to move the target demographic up the age scale. Wouldn't you be tempted to look into the product suggested to the witty and entertaining new "friend" you met over IM? Come on, really.