You know what really annoys me? Seeing people (and I'm guilty of this too) mixing hot and cold fluids together. Cold milk out of the fridge into hot coffee, using a hot gas flame to warm up food, that sort of thing. I should imagine that in millions of years' time, when the heat death of the universe is well underway, needless and wasteful increase in entropy will be punishable by permanent deletion.
I'm not sure how using someone's CPU cycles while they're enjoying a game that you provided to them otherwise free-of-charge is a bad thing. Care to elaborate?
The same thing that happens when you're standing on a train that's moving at the speed of light and you throw a ball forwards.
*ahem* I mean, the script could set a "last batch accepted" timestamp in a cookie or somesuch when it starts, and delete the cookie when it's done, and only run a processing batch when either it can't find a cookie or it's been 10min since the last task.
Why have you assumed the javascript user ran the site for 5 hours a day for a week, but that the installed.exe user ran it for a year? Even if one accepts your estimate of an installed.exe as being 400x faster than a javascript app, you should at least allow equal running time. And are you sure that modern browsers on multicore machines don't let multiple JS threads run on different cores?
In which case, I would find it easy to believe that for every one slashdotter who would install a distributed computing node, there would be at least 500 who would leave a/. window open while they're at work (and possibly have another one open at work).
Problems 1 and 2 are based on the faulty assumption that "a web site" is a single piece of hardware, whereas for a system like this it would obviously be a server farm connected to the intarwebz by several high-volume dedicated gateways.
Problem 3 has to be solved in any real-world implementation, so is pretty obvious (and tractable with timeouts etc) imo.
Problem 4 is the tough one - you can either slug your performance hard by running calculations multiple times, or you figure out some way to authenticate the output as being from the particular algorithm, which is never going to be 100% unbreakable but will deter casual vandals.
Firefox 3 on Vista on my work desktop loads/. pages flawlessly, whereas and my very similarly spec'd home computer running Firefox 3 on xubuntu 8.10 freezes up for a couple of second when it loads a long comments page. Not long enough to be a pain but it's definitely noticable. My eee 900, however, will lock up for 10+ seconds loading a hot/. topic. >.<
This could be a possible way to generate revenue from popular websites... instead of selling something of such dubious quality as "advertising impressions", high-volume sites such as/. could support themselves by taxing, say, 10% of a viewer's CPU with an unobtrusive background thread, and selling the aggregated processing power to customers. I'd certainly be happier donating a percentage of my otherwise totally wasted CPU time to a site than having to read crappy ads for products I don't want.
If someone concludes that a dead person is alive, or vice versa, from the fact that no death date is recorded, then that person has failed, not the database. If the application through which the person interacts with the database interpreted that lack of a death date as the person being alive, then the application has failed or the data are faulty. If the database design doesn't say anything about the issue, then it's the database's fault.
Now we're getting somewhat abstract. Does the C standard say that "left to right short circuit evaluation must take place" (stipulating the actual operations performed by the CPU), or does it simply dictate how the code will function logically? (ie. "the code must perform as if the conditions had been evaluated left to right in short-circuit fashion"). The latter would allow optimisations such as performing both tests in parallel IF neither has any side effects (which often is the case).
IANADBIAAAM (I am not a doctor but I am an amateur mechanic), but the first thing I look at when trying to figure out what's wrong with my car is "what does it sound like?" and I'd be amazed if diagnosing a human is any different. The sound the working bits make is generated by the way they move, so if they're moving abnormally they'll sound different.
I always find it interesting when you have an ongoing agreement between a company and an employee, whereby the employee works X hours and gets paid $Y, and then the company decides it can simply ask the employee to work longer for less money. Usually it's couched as a temporary thing but frankly, once the employee has agreed to do more for less, why would the company ever go back to the original agreement?
Something similar happened at my (now ex-)work, they ran out of funding and told people to go home until they could pay us. Then a couple of weeks ago they sent out an email saying "hi folks, we really need to get working again to keep the company viable, no we don't have any money but you'll start work again Monday right?". To which the answer was "um, no" for me, but a surprising number of people said "oh, uh, ok then".
You can still make use of buttons alone and accomplish that (for example: guitar hero).
Actually Guitar Hero is a great example of a custom controller making the game work. Ever tried playing it with just a standard controller? Nope, me neither.
Egads! "When HARLIE Was One" was in our school library, and boggled my twelve-year-old mind with its lone (for now relatively mild) sex scene. I don't remember much about the AI though, it seemed fairly generic "person-on-IRC-but-OMG-ITS-A-MASHEEN".
Why do they list power as MW-h? That sort of thing always annoys the hell out of me, it's like last time I went shopping for gas heaters and the salesman was crapping on about 3 gigajoule and 6 gigajoule heaters, I asked him what time period that quantity of energy was released over and he just gave me this blank stare as if I'd started speaking Martian.
Every sale of the game will have to be ~at cost and come with several free guest passes (10-15 keys for buying in the box, 3-5 passes if you buy online). Once people start playing, offer basic & collector's edition account upgrades in addition to the monthly fee.
Careful here. There's a strong negative effect on a game's community if the bar to entry is too low. There are still plenty of tards but the count is much much lower than on free MMOs.
Slashdot Mirror
(+1, Thoughtcrime)
Congratulations, he's a human cockroach. :P
Or we could just call everyone Zem, so that when one of us is killed by Terrists we don't know who it was, and we aren't afraid.
It is also a major component of DHMO, and we all know how bad THAT is.
You know what really annoys me? Seeing people (and I'm guilty of this too) mixing hot and cold fluids together. Cold milk out of the fridge into hot coffee, using a hot gas flame to warm up food, that sort of thing. I should imagine that in millions of years' time, when the heat death of the universe is well underway, needless and wasteful increase in entropy will be punishable by permanent deletion.
I'm not sure how using someone's CPU cycles while they're enjoying a game that you provided to them otherwise free-of-charge is a bad thing. Care to elaborate?
I think botnets are slightly harder to opt out of...
The same thing that happens when you're standing on a train that's moving at the speed of light and you throw a ball forwards.
*ahem* I mean, the script could set a "last batch accepted" timestamp in a cookie or somesuch when it starts, and delete the cookie when it's done, and only run a processing batch when either it can't find a cookie or it's been 10min since the last task.
Why have you assumed the javascript user ran the site for 5 hours a day for a week, but that the installed .exe user ran it for a year? Even if one accepts your estimate of an installed .exe as being 400x faster than a javascript app, you should at least allow equal running time. And are you sure that modern browsers on multicore machines don't let multiple JS threads run on different cores?
/. window open while they're at work (and possibly have another one open at work).
In which case, I would find it easy to believe that for every one slashdotter who would install a distributed computing node, there would be at least 500 who would leave a
Problems 1 and 2 are based on the faulty assumption that "a web site" is a single piece of hardware, whereas for a system like this it would obviously be a server farm connected to the intarwebz by several high-volume dedicated gateways.
Problem 3 has to be solved in any real-world implementation, so is pretty obvious (and tractable with timeouts etc) imo.
Problem 4 is the tough one - you can either slug your performance hard by running calculations multiple times, or you figure out some way to authenticate the output as being from the particular algorithm, which is never going to be 100% unbreakable but will deter casual vandals.
Firefox 3 on Vista on my work desktop loads /. pages flawlessly, whereas and my very similarly spec'd home computer running Firefox 3 on xubuntu 8.10 freezes up for a couple of second when it loads a long comments page. Not long enough to be a pain but it's definitely noticable. My eee 900, however, will lock up for 10+ seconds loading a hot /. topic. >.<
This could be a possible way to generate revenue from popular websites... instead of selling something of such dubious quality as "advertising impressions", high-volume sites such as /. could support themselves by taxing, say, 10% of a viewer's CPU with an unobtrusive background thread, and selling the aggregated processing power to customers. I'd certainly be happier donating a percentage of my otherwise totally wasted CPU time to a site than having to read crappy ads for products I don't want.
If someone concludes that a dead person is alive, or vice versa, from the fact that no death date is recorded, then that person has failed, not the database. If the application through which the person interacts with the database interpreted that lack of a death date as the person being alive, then the application has failed or the data are faulty. If the database design doesn't say anything about the issue, then it's the database's fault.
NULL = NULL should evaluate to NULL, not true or false.
You Haskellers are like furries or homosexuals, always needing to advertise your deviation to normal people.
Having been forced to ingest a greasy lump of Gopher as a first-year student, this made me laugh hard enough to make it my first new /. sig in years.
Now we're getting somewhat abstract. Does the C standard say that "left to right short circuit evaluation must take place" (stipulating the actual operations performed by the CPU), or does it simply dictate how the code will function logically? (ie. "the code must perform as if the conditions had been evaluated left to right in short-circuit fashion"). The latter would allow optimisations such as performing both tests in parallel IF neither has any side effects (which often is the case).
IANADBIAAAM (I am not a doctor but I am an amateur mechanic), but the first thing I look at when trying to figure out what's wrong with my car is "what does it sound like?" and I'd be amazed if diagnosing a human is any different. The sound the working bits make is generated by the way they move, so if they're moving abnormally they'll sound different.
I always find it interesting when you have an ongoing agreement between a company and an employee, whereby the employee works X hours and gets paid $Y, and then the company decides it can simply ask the employee to work longer for less money. Usually it's couched as a temporary thing but frankly, once the employee has agreed to do more for less, why would the company ever go back to the original agreement?
Something similar happened at my (now ex-)work, they ran out of funding and told people to go home until they could pay us. Then a couple of weeks ago they sent out an email saying "hi folks, we really need to get working again to keep the company viable, no we don't have any money but you'll start work again Monday right?". To which the answer was "um, no" for me, but a surprising number of people said "oh, uh, ok then".
If that's true, then a lot of people are complete idiots.
You must be new here, and by 'here' I don't mean /.
You can still make use of buttons alone and accomplish that (for example: guitar hero).
Actually Guitar Hero is a great example of a custom controller making the game work. Ever tried playing it with just a standard controller? Nope, me neither.
As another child of the 80s... Grandmaster Flash. Yeah.
Egads! "When HARLIE Was One" was in our school library, and boggled my twelve-year-old mind with its lone (for now relatively mild) sex scene. I don't remember much about the AI though, it seemed fairly generic "person-on-IRC-but-OMG-ITS-A-MASHEEN".
Why do they list power as MW-h? That sort of thing always annoys the hell out of me, it's like last time I went shopping for gas heaters and the salesman was crapping on about 3 gigajoule and 6 gigajoule heaters, I asked him what time period that quantity of energy was released over and he just gave me this blank stare as if I'd started speaking Martian.
Working IN the station (inside a very well grounded Faraday cage) would sure beat working NEAR the station (in a normal building).
Every sale of the game will have to be ~at cost and come with several free guest passes (10-15 keys for buying in the box, 3-5 passes if you buy online). Once people start playing, offer basic & collector's edition account upgrades in addition to the monthly fee.
Careful here. There's a strong negative effect on a game's community if the bar to entry is too low. There are still plenty of tards but the count is much much lower than on free MMOs.