I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. Literally 80% of my calls are from telemarketers. I wish I were exaggerating, but I'm not -- we get at least three or four a day, ranging from around 7:30AM to 11:00PM.
While it is of course true that hardware-based solutions are the best way to generate random numbers, computers are not deterministic.
Processors are deterministic. Computers are not.
There's a big difference. For instance, if you rerun the same sequence of instructions on a processor and those instructions do not depend on anything other than the processor, it will always take the same amount of time. The second you bring other hardware such as hard drives into the equation, determinism breaks down because the length of time it takes to perform operations, as well as whether or not those operations will succeed, is not deterministic.
This is one reason why incorrectly-synchronized multithreaded programs behave in a non-deterministic fashion -- the length of time it takes to perform certain operations using a computer (such as read a file) varies unpredictably, and this affects the way the threads get timesliced. This, of course, may affect things such as whether a deadlock occurs. The catch is, there is nothing you can do to make that deterministic. You could run the offending program on the bare hardware, start it at the exact same clock cycle and feed it exactly the same inputs every time, and you would still see that it did not always behave exactly the same.
You can actually use this principle to create some pretty damned good random numbers on a computer. Naturally, they'll never be as good as a dedicated hardware random-number generator, but they're a lot better than ordinary pseudorandom numbers.
I work for Yahoo. Trust me, Gecko-based browsers do not make up 15% of the general web population, regardless of what you're seeing at your particular sites.
I believe what you meant to say was "My entire understanding of physics comes from half-remembered articles in Scientific American that I didn't really understand."
Whatever happened to people putting up web pages for fun? Is the net to become one big corporate controlled money making machine?
This sentiment has so many things wrong with it that I don't even know where to begin.
I'll settle for saying that information will be free as soon as you foot the bandwidth bill for the entire Internet yourself. Unless you're willing to do that, shut up.
But paying to get into areas of the net? - Chilling
Paying to board a ship? Chilling.
Paying to get into a San Francisco Giants game? Chilling.
Paying to get into a nightclub? Chilling.
Paying to get on a plane? Chilling.
Paying to enter a movie theater? Chilling.
Paying to cross a toll bridge? Chilling.
Why is it so "chilling" that you might have to pay to access areas of the net, whereas you blithely accept that you have to pay to do a whole lot of other things without complaint? Why is the net magically supposed to be free?
Somebody put together the content you want to see, and they want you to pay for it. Oh, those evil, evil bastards. How dare they.
[i]There are plenty of products that produce well in excess of 100% profit margin.[/i]
"Profit margin" is the fraction of the product's sale price which is profit. A product which sells for twice its production cost has a 50% profit margin.
It is impossible to have a profit margin of over 100%, as that would require the cost of producing the product to be negative.
Actually, I would suggest that a much bigger problem is people blindly believing stories they hear without actually bothering to do a little research first. Thus are urban legends propagated.
The best reference for the Dvorak vs. Qwerty debate is probably "The Fable of the Keys", which you may find to be interesting reading. Also, in case you don't read the article, I would point out that the "Qwerty designed to slow typists down" myth is just a myth. No factual basis whatsoever.
It was designed to reduce jamming, by making sure that keys likely to pressed in succession were likely to be on opposite sides of the keyboard, and therefore reduce the likelihood that the hammers would jam. That, of course, has the nice benefit of making most successive keypresses performed by alternating hands, which is actually a benefit to efficiency. That's not to say that Qwerty is optimal, just that the urban legends in circulation about it are completely false.
[i]The flicker you see on a monitor is caused by the monitor and the room's lighting interfering with each other and causing beat frequencies: very much like two musical instruments that aren't quite in tune.[/i]
I usually have all the lights off when I work on a computer, and I can still see flicker whenever the refresh rate is under 85Hz. I've had cases where some unrelated change in my video driver settings caused (for whatever reason) the refresh rate to drop to 60Hz, and I had to go fix it because the flicker was bothering me so much. It has nothing to do with room lighting.
So it makes my day just a bit brigher when I see them getting smacked down for it. But, I would much prefer to see a $143 billion instead of million. That would get their attention
That's many times Nintendo's total worth. Are you suggesting that the world would be a better place if they were simply forced out of business for this?
While we're at it, let's institute the death penalty for speeding. That will get their attention.
Laying down on the desert floor is one thing, but imagine the same guy sprinting down a supermarket isle and the suit trying to keep up with the thousands of colors and shapes flying at it..some SERIOUS processing power would be needed to handle that kind of rapid changing.
How is that even the tiniest bit different than what a video camera hooked up to a TV does?
It captures an image and reproduces it elsewhere in real-time. That certainly doesn't require massive processing power, and the resolution of this device doesn't even need to be as high as a video camera, since all you're trying to do is blend in. Camouflage works perfectly well for blending in, and it's hardly a high-resolution duplicate of the surroundings.
Marriage is the basic Christian family value, and the survey found that married people were happier than singles by an 18 point margin.
This sentence from the article you cite makes me extremely suspicious. Note that the fact that married people are happier than singles potentially has nothing to do with Christianity. It could just as easily be due to the fact that married couples have a deeper emotional bond, unrelated to their religions -- and yet the author brings Christianity into the equation with the implication that it is somehow responsible. The entire article is written in this fashion, making it difficult to separate true conclusions from vague assertions.
Further, the author's references are not well-documented (and the few I searched for did not appear to be available for free online), the author did not cite meaningful statistics directly related to Christianity, and quite clearly has strong pro-Christian biases.
I am curious to see the facts from which these conclusions are drawn, but they are sadly not available anywhere I could find them. I did, however, manage to find countless copies of the article you linked to -- people are more concerned with the conclusions than fact-checking, it seems.
That said, even while as a programmer I'm somewhat rooting for Deep Fritz, as a fellow man I can't help but be in awe of the fact that Kramnik is able to think better than a machine that "thinks" millions of times faster than him.
Why? I can, for instance, look at a picture of my wife and identify her as my wife in a fraction of a second. The best image-recognition software in the world can't reliably do even that simple task.
I'm not the least bit surprised to see a human beating a computer in a complex activity like chess, and that's with lots of handicaps in Fritz' favor (it doesn't have to analyze an image of the board in order to determine where the pieces are, for instance). The amazing part is not the human beating the computer, but the computer beating the human (which won't happen in this case, but it's getting close).
Changes in temperature won't affect the outcome? Let's take away the heatsink/fan and see does. Man: 1, Egg cooker formerly known as a mutliprocessor chess computer: 0.
The heatsink and fan are integral parts of the computer, necessary for its survival. How well would the human do without his lungs?
An intact computer can generally withstand much higher temperatures than a human.
Considering the price difference between consoles and PCs, I think it's only fair to toss a nice TV into the mix for a more even comparison. Current consoles can handle progressive scan on a compatible TV, so interlacing isn't a big issue. Not all games support progessive scan, but not all PC games look as good as Doom 3, either.
If a TV were effectively only 320x200, it wouldn't be possible to see the difference between (say) low and high resolution on the Nintendo 64. Its low resolution is 320x240, and its high resolution is 640x480. Yet the two resolutions are dramatically different on any halfway-decent television.
Likewise, one reason why the current crop of consoles looks better than the PSX/N64/Saturn generation is due to running in 640x480 rather than 320x200. Animal Crossing is a perfect example -- it's a straight GameCube port of an N64 game, yet it looks enormously better than the N64 original due to the resolution upgrade.
[i] 320x200, at 4 times the resolution is 1280x800, well above 640x480. 640x480 is only approximately 2x the resolution he originally quoted.
You may be able to fit four copies of his screen onto yours, but that doesn't make it 4x the resolution, you have to look at the actual dimensions.[/i]
For his next trick, GreenHell will demonstrate that a 4 megapixel camera (2000 x 2000) is really only twice the resolution of a 1 megapixel (1000 x 1000) camera! It's the New Math!
Sorry, 4x the number of pixels gives you 4x the resolution.
No idea where you got that number from, but NTSC is 525 lines vertically, not 243. The horizontal scan rate is less well-defined, but certainly upwards of 600.
Have you ever looked at a console game, or are you just pulling this out of your ass?
First, consoles currently run in 640x480 (4x the resolution you quote), generally with antialiasing.
Secondly, go take a look at Star Fox Adventures for the GameCube. Tell me how many PC games look as good. I might be willing to give you Doom 3, but A) it's not out yet, and B) it requires a damn expensive machine to look that good.
Despite claims by PC fans of what their $400 accelerator cards can do, most console games look much better than PC games for the simple reason that the console hardware is a known quantity and can therefore be optimized for.
You also don't have to deal with installation issues, device driver conflicts, patches, replacing your $100 soundcard because it causes Neverwinter Nights to crash for no apparent reason, and so forth. Plus all modern consoles have great controllers, whereas PC games can't assume they have access to anything but a keyboard and mouse.
Oh yes, I'm sure that's an accurate description of Microsoft's altruistic intentions. I can't imagine that, say, driving Apple out of the education market by giving away free stuff had anything to do with it.
Think of the children. Microsoft certainly is. They're future customers, after all.
Slashdot Mirror
I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. Literally 80% of my calls are from telemarketers. I wish I were exaggerating, but I'm not -- we get at least three or four a day, ranging from around 7:30AM to 11:00PM.
Fuckers.
While it is of course true that hardware-based solutions are the best way to generate random numbers, computers are not deterministic.
Processors are deterministic. Computers are not.
There's a big difference. For instance, if you rerun the same sequence of instructions on a processor and those instructions do not depend on anything other than the processor, it will always take the same amount of time. The second you bring other hardware such as hard drives into the equation, determinism breaks down because the length of time it takes to perform operations, as well as whether or not those operations will succeed, is not deterministic.
This is one reason why incorrectly-synchronized multithreaded programs behave in a non-deterministic fashion -- the length of time it takes to perform certain operations using a computer (such as read a file) varies unpredictably, and this affects the way the threads get timesliced. This, of course, may affect things such as whether a deadlock occurs. The catch is, there is nothing you can do to make that deterministic. You could run the offending program on the bare hardware, start it at the exact same clock cycle and feed it exactly the same inputs every time, and you would still see that it did not always behave exactly the same.
You can actually use this principle to create some pretty damned good random numbers on a computer. Naturally, they'll never be as good as a dedicated hardware random-number generator, but they're a lot better than ordinary pseudorandom numbers.
I work for Yahoo. Trust me, Gecko-based browsers do not make up 15% of the general web population, regardless of what you're seeing at your particular sites.
You made a typo in your post.
I believe what you meant to say was "My entire understanding of physics comes from half-remembered articles in Scientific American that I didn't really understand."
Whatever happened to people putting up web pages for fun? Is the net to become one big corporate controlled money making machine?
This sentiment has so many things wrong with it that I don't even know where to begin.
I'll settle for saying that information will be free as soon as you foot the bandwidth bill for the entire Internet yourself. Unless you're willing to do that, shut up.
But paying to get into areas of the net? - Chilling
Paying to board a ship? Chilling.
Paying to get into a San Francisco Giants game? Chilling.
Paying to get into a nightclub? Chilling.
Paying to get on a plane? Chilling.
Paying to enter a movie theater? Chilling.
Paying to cross a toll bridge? Chilling.
Why is it so "chilling" that you might have to pay to access areas of the net, whereas you blithely accept that you have to pay to do a whole lot of other things without complaint? Why is the net magically supposed to be free?
Somebody put together the content you want to see, and they want you to pay for it. Oh, those evil, evil bastards. How dare they.
[i]There are plenty of products that produce well in excess of 100% profit margin.[/i]
"Profit margin" is the fraction of the product's sale price which is profit. A product which sells for twice its production cost has a 50% profit margin.
It is impossible to have a profit margin of over 100%, as that would require the cost of producing the product to be negative.
Actually, I would suggest that a much bigger problem is people blindly believing stories they hear without actually bothering to do a little research first. Thus are urban legends propagated.
The best reference for the Dvorak vs. Qwerty debate is probably "The Fable of the Keys", which you may find to be interesting reading. Also, in case you don't read the article, I would point out that the "Qwerty designed to slow typists down" myth is just a myth. No factual basis whatsoever.
It was designed to reduce jamming, by making sure that keys likely to pressed in succession were likely to be on opposite sides of the keyboard, and therefore reduce the likelihood that the hammers would jam. That, of course, has the nice benefit of making most successive keypresses performed by alternating hands, which is actually a benefit to efficiency. That's not to say that Qwerty is optimal, just that the urban legends in circulation about it are completely false.
[i]The flicker you see on a monitor is caused by the monitor and the room's lighting interfering with each other and causing beat frequencies: very much like two musical instruments that aren't quite in tune.[/i]
I usually have all the lights off when I work on a computer, and I can still see flicker whenever the refresh rate is under 85Hz. I've had cases where some unrelated change in my video driver settings caused (for whatever reason) the refresh rate to drop to 60Hz, and I had to go fix it because the flicker was bothering me so much. It has nothing to do with room lighting.
So it makes my day just a bit brigher when I see them getting smacked down for it. But, I would much prefer to see a $143 billion instead of million. That would get their attention
That's many times Nintendo's total worth. Are you suggesting that the world would be a better place if they were simply forced out of business for this?
While we're at it, let's institute the death penalty for speeding. That will get their attention.
Laying down on the desert floor is one thing, but imagine the same guy sprinting down a supermarket isle and the suit trying to keep up with the thousands of colors and shapes flying at it..some SERIOUS processing power would be needed to handle that kind of rapid changing.
How is that even the tiniest bit different than what a video camera hooked up to a TV does?
It captures an image and reproduces it elsewhere in real-time. That certainly doesn't require massive processing power, and the resolution of this device doesn't even need to be as high as a video camera, since all you're trying to do is blend in. Camouflage works perfectly well for blending in, and it's hardly a high-resolution duplicate of the surroundings.
Shoot me an email -- ethan@yahoo-inc.com
I didn't see yours listed on your site anywhere.
Holy fucking shit. Hi Vic, it's Ethan.
;-).
Somehow, I never pictured you seeking political office
Marriage is the basic Christian family value, and the survey found that married people were happier than singles by an 18 point margin.
This sentence from the article you cite makes me extremely suspicious. Note that the fact that married people are happier than singles potentially has nothing to do with Christianity. It could just as easily be due to the fact that married couples have a deeper emotional bond, unrelated to their religions -- and yet the author brings Christianity into the equation with the implication that it is somehow responsible. The entire article is written in this fashion, making it difficult to separate true conclusions from vague assertions.
Further, the author's references are not well-documented (and the few I searched for did not appear to be available for free online), the author did not cite meaningful statistics directly related to Christianity, and quite clearly has strong pro-Christian biases.
I am curious to see the facts from which these conclusions are drawn, but they are sadly not available anywhere I could find them. I did, however, manage to find countless copies of the article you linked to -- people are more concerned with the conclusions than fact-checking, it seems.
That said, even while as a programmer I'm somewhat rooting for Deep Fritz, as a fellow man I can't help but be in awe of the fact that Kramnik is able to think better than a machine that "thinks" millions of times faster than him.
Why? I can, for instance, look at a picture of my wife and identify her as my wife in a fraction of a second. The best image-recognition software in the world can't reliably do even that simple task.
I'm not the least bit surprised to see a human beating a computer in a complex activity like chess, and that's with lots of handicaps in Fritz' favor (it doesn't have to analyze an image of the board in order to determine where the pieces are, for instance). The amazing part is not the human beating the computer, but the computer beating the human (which won't happen in this case, but it's getting close).
Changes in temperature won't affect the outcome? Let's take away the heatsink/fan and see does. Man: 1, Egg cooker formerly known as a mutliprocessor chess computer: 0.
The heatsink and fan are integral parts of the computer, necessary for its survival. How well would the human do without his lungs?
An intact computer can generally withstand much higher temperatures than a human.
Considering the price difference between consoles and PCs, I think it's only fair to toss a nice TV into the mix for a more even comparison. Current consoles can handle progressive scan on a compatible TV, so interlacing isn't a big issue. Not all games support progessive scan, but not all PC games look as good as Doom 3, either.
Huh? You can name one game that the PC has and consoles don't, and that stands as some sort of argument?
Okay, play Gran Turismo 3, Super Mario Sunshine, or Halo on your PC, and then we'll talk.
If a TV were effectively only 320x200, it wouldn't be possible to see the difference between (say) low and high resolution on the Nintendo 64. Its low resolution is 320x240, and its high resolution is 640x480. Yet the two resolutions are dramatically different on any halfway-decent television.
Likewise, one reason why the current crop of consoles looks better than the PSX/N64/Saturn generation is due to running in 640x480 rather than 320x200. Animal Crossing is a perfect example -- it's a straight GameCube port of an N64 game, yet it looks enormously better than the N64 original due to the resolution upgrade.
Crap. Forgot where I was posting and used the wrong format for the tags. Should've previewed.
[i] 320x200, at 4 times the resolution is 1280x800, well above 640x480. 640x480 is only approximately 2x the resolution he originally quoted.
You may be able to fit four copies of his screen onto yours, but that doesn't make it 4x the resolution, you have to look at the actual dimensions.[/i]
For his next trick, GreenHell will demonstrate that a 4 megapixel camera (2000 x 2000) is really only twice the resolution of a 1 megapixel (1000 x 1000) camera! It's the New Math!
Sorry, 4x the number of pixels gives you 4x the resolution.
No idea where you got that number from, but NTSC is 525 lines vertically, not 243. The horizontal scan rate is less well-defined, but certainly upwards of 600.
Have you ever looked at a console game, or are you just pulling this out of your ass?
First, consoles currently run in 640x480 (4x the resolution you quote), generally with antialiasing.
Secondly, go take a look at Star Fox Adventures for the GameCube. Tell me how many PC games look as good. I might be willing to give you Doom 3, but A) it's not out yet, and B) it requires a damn expensive machine to look that good.
Despite claims by PC fans of what their $400 accelerator cards can do, most console games look much better than PC games for the simple reason that the console hardware is a known quantity and can therefore be optimized for.
You also don't have to deal with installation issues, device driver conflicts, patches, replacing your $100 soundcard because it causes Neverwinter Nights to crash for no apparent reason, and so forth. Plus all modern consoles have great controllers, whereas PC games can't assume they have access to anything but a keyboard and mouse.
Seriously, what was anyone expecting?
Oh yes, I'm sure that's an accurate description of Microsoft's altruistic intentions. I can't imagine that, say, driving Apple out of the education market by giving away free stuff had anything to do with it.
Think of the children. Microsoft certainly is. They're future customers, after all.