But seriously, this "jailbreak" is a Microsoft-sanctioned app that costs $9 and requires you to log-in to windows live...
Doesn't sound like a jailbreak to me. Sounds like something that Microsoft should have BEEN OFFERING IN THE FIRST PLACE.
Whats that, we get to run whatever app we want on the computer we bought? THANKS MICROSOFT! Hey, it beats the $99 yearly fee to get a dev licence.
Seriously? Do they not want people developing for their platform? (oh, that's right, they only want big companies. They don't care about hobbyists at all.)
Is Windows 8 going to require a jailbreak to install homebrew too?!? Madness.
I'm sick of defective by design and I'll not be celebrating some "features" that they finally enabled. Its my device. Let me use it already.
No, a staggering amount of students clearly don't have the necessary understanding of the underlying material in upper level classes. Somehow they manage to copy or group-project their way through, and most will even graduate. Then they get to the workforce, and they have absolutely nothing to offer... *sigh*
This is why degrees are about as worthless as the paper they're printed on now. We've watered it down too much, it used to be having a degree was a certification that you had knowledge and skill, and so an employer could safely bet on hiring you. Now, you've either got to already have experience, or have a masters or a doctorate. So, what was the point of a bachelor's degree again?
Yeah, these should be HUGE red flags that something has gone far, far awry with our education system. Students using performance enhancing drugs for quizzes and tests instead of football games? Really? It would be unheard of and appalling just a few decades ago. Now its practically accepted common practice.
If ALL the students in a class feel they have to take performance enhancing drugs just to keep up, then we are putting students into an exceptionally damaging and destructive learning environment. This is going to have untold many negative consequences to our society and these students later in life.
Classes barely teach anymore, they're just practice for test taking.
If it wasn't illegal to buy snuff films, they'd be widely purchased and a market created for such
Actually, I just read an article, I think it was by BBC, that said that after doing much research, their conclusion was there is no such thing as a snuff film, nobody has actually made a snuff film, and there is no market for snuff films. Its just too difficult / costly to murder people for entertainment as opposed to doing fiction.
Apparently you don't know about the problems with video games down under. Many are outright banned right now as they do not meet the requirements for the Australian teen rating (13?) and thus cannot be sold, and some of it makes no sense. Some violent games get through, some barely-violent games get banned. Many then end up resorting to piracy, so then the games industry says "oh, its just pirates there, we won't bother" and it just cycles around and around. (Like Russia, which has been blown off as full of pirates, so nobody localizes for Russia, so there are more pirates... Gabe Newell just did an interview where he addressed it and they found that if they did proper releases in Russia, their sales were 3-5x what people expected).
The very thought that content would have to be approved before getting sold to adults is chilling.
yeah, Orwell thought it was scary too.:) In all seriousness though, censorship is a problem.
The entire article should be thrown out, it doesn't say anything useful at all.
Also, if you thought that ANY solution of pancake flipping would win you a million dollars, you need to have your head examined. The problem obviously has more to it than that.
It took a bit to realize the problem is not sorting the pancakes, but finding the optimal sequence of flips to sort the pancakes.
If a trivially easy algorithm would win you the Millennium Prize, odds are you're not understanding the problem. We're talking about millions of dollars and world record status. If any first year CS 101 student could solve this, THEY WOULD HAVE. This stuff is cutting-edge science for a reason; its REALLY COMPLICATED.
I don't get why this is so shocking -__- wow.
It is simply blowing my mind how many people do not get this. I thought/. was full of programmers and computer scientists? Guess not. Jeepers.
Doesn't help that TFA barely said ANYTHING about P vs NP at all, pretty much just said "hey guys, pancake algorithm is cool, read a description! Oh yeah, and some scientists somewhere proved something about this. Don't worry about that part."
The fiddly part is that the question is what is the minimal number of flips required to sort the stack. Finding some number of flips that will sort the stack is fairly straightforward.
Yeah, exactly! People are completely misunderstanding and seem to think that a pancake sorting algorithm proves P = NP, which is just silly; ANY programmer worth his salt can write a pancake sorting algorithm right now trivially. Most of the comments on this page have absolutely nothing to do with computational complexity, and people are either arguing about the algorithm implementation or about syrup.
It doesn't help that TFA barely explained anything other than the pancake sorting algorithm. I'd like to know how you can check that X is the minimum number of flips for a given N pancakes in NP time. It seems to me like in order to verify that X is indeed the minimum number, you'd have to calculate the minimum number, thus putting this in P.
Its pancake sorting. Everybody's done it. Its like mergesort and towers of hanoi, its one of those trivially easy to understand problems that you learn when you're getting into programming that still requires a decent bit of logic to solve. Easy to understand, not so easy to implement.
Doesn't mean that Gates' version was optimal, and certainly doesn't say anything about P vs NP:P
He's not saying they're the exact same. He's saying algorithmic-ally they're similar problems, and they are. In both you are modifying a set and then recursively modifying sub-sets of that set. The logic to working both out is very similar, even if in Hanoi you have 3 posts, and in pancakes just the 1 stack. In both, you are performing an operation (a move, or a flip) on a stack of elements, but then that operation will disturb the inner state of that set, so then you have to perform additional recursive operations to restore the state of the inner subset to the set.
Its like saying that mergesort and quicksort are similar. They are. They are also different.
There is a pancake flipping algorithm. Have you heard of it?
Seriously, pancake flipping has been around forever. Seriously, its one of the few algorithms that even Bill Gates has implemented:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancake_sorting#History
And apparently the co-creator of Futurama has as well.
TFA mentions that they proved pancake flipping was NP-Hard. Cool. THATS IT. It doesn't explain how they got to this conclusion, it doesn't explain the significance, it doesn't extrapolate anything useful...
Uh, did we read the same article? Because what I just read barely explained the pancake flipping algorithm, and that's it. If you like the pancake algorithm, that's fine, but that has almost nothing to do with P vs NP other than the fact that it is AN example of A problem. The article didn't explain how they proved it was NP-Hard, they didn't explain what P vs NP is at all, they didn't explain why P vs NP is significant...
What exactly do you understand now that you didn't before?
Mathematics is complicated, unfortunately that's just the nature of it, there's no shortcuts. Sometimes ideas can be better communicated through metaphor, but I think you're gotten hung up on the pancakes and as a result you're missing the forest for the trees.
Yeah, pretty similar. Even the pancake flipping has been around since the 80s, lots of people have taken cracks at it. The interesting thing here is the P vs NP problem, which the paper barely even mentions and does not explain whatsoever.
But Windows doesn't innovate, and they don't think.
Amen, brother. I know M$-bashing gets some flak on/. for being everybody's favorite straw-man, but seriously, this OS is embarrassing. I can count the number of useful features they've added since 98SE on my left hand.
Too bad Microsoft hasn't REALLY embraced gaming, they're just competing with Sony for console hardware.
Windows 7 is still extremely naive about handling games. There should be options in the OS to disable the windows key when full-screen applications are running, windows should be MUCH better about recognizing games, Games For Windows Live is a JOKE (this I especially don't understand, Xbox Live is actually very impressive, and it should be EASIER to provide that kind of service on a PC. Gamespy has been doing it for FREE for years, but MS continually just releases a crap of DRM they call GFWL with no "features" a gamer would ever possibly use).
The amusing thing is AB is just a graphically updated version of the old games we used to play on c64 and apple ][e, where you selected an angle and velocity for your cannon, and fired a projectile at a target over polynomial generated mountains.
Depending upon how old you are, you're either talking about Artillery, Scorched Earth, or Worms.
Apple II makes it sound like the original Artillery.:) Great game. Scorched Earth was the one I got really into, and then worms is just silly and awesome.
That said, AB is actually simpler than Artillery even, you don't get to move and your positions aren't as random, there's no terrain making things interesting, and there's certainly none of the worms variety. Its almost more of a modern flash physics catapult game than a proper artillery game, and that might be where some of the hate comes from. Its an extremely limited game, very casual, to the point of being like bejeweled. Serious gamers don't want to hear Halo or Age of Empires being compared to bejeweled, because it seems to belittle their complex strategy and gaming experiences down into little repetitive toys.
Its all probably just a defense reaction to gaming being branded nerdy in the first place.
there are rituals and habits constructed around it. E.g., my best friend needs to smoke before grading tests (she doesn't smoke at other times).
You are describing a habit, not a physical addiction. The two have become completely muddied up in the common vernacular.
Picking your nose is a bad habit. Heroin is a physical addiction. You can find it difficult to stop picking your nose, but you don't get the shakes when you finally do.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft jailbreaks you!
But seriously, this "jailbreak" is a Microsoft-sanctioned app that costs $9 and requires you to log-in to windows live... Doesn't sound like a jailbreak to me. Sounds like something that Microsoft should have BEEN OFFERING IN THE FIRST PLACE.
Whats that, we get to run whatever app we want on the computer we bought? THANKS MICROSOFT! Hey, it beats the $99 yearly fee to get a dev licence.
Seriously? Do they not want people developing for their platform? (oh, that's right, they only want big companies. They don't care about hobbyists at all.)
Is Windows 8 going to require a jailbreak to install homebrew too?!? Madness.
I'm sick of defective by design and I'll not be celebrating some "features" that they finally enabled. Its my device. Let me use it already.
No, a staggering amount of students clearly don't have the necessary understanding of the underlying material in upper level classes. Somehow they manage to copy or group-project their way through, and most will even graduate. Then they get to the workforce, and they have absolutely nothing to offer... *sigh*
This is why degrees are about as worthless as the paper they're printed on now. We've watered it down too much, it used to be having a degree was a certification that you had knowledge and skill, and so an employer could safely bet on hiring you. Now, you've either got to already have experience, or have a masters or a doctorate. So, what was the point of a bachelor's degree again?
It has nothing to do with the students, and everything to do with the environment.
Yeah, these should be HUGE red flags that something has gone far, far awry with our education system. Students using performance enhancing drugs for quizzes and tests instead of football games? Really? It would be unheard of and appalling just a few decades ago. Now its practically accepted common practice.
If ALL the students in a class feel they have to take performance enhancing drugs just to keep up, then we are putting students into an exceptionally damaging and destructive learning environment. This is going to have untold many negative consequences to our society and these students later in life.
Classes barely teach anymore, they're just practice for test taking.
I wasn't berating anyone, I was informing. Calm down.
Fair enough. But where do you live? I live in the United States, and it ain't a whole lot better over here these days.
That said, child pornography is a serious concern.
If it wasn't illegal to buy snuff films, they'd be widely purchased and a market created for such
Actually, I just read an article, I think it was by BBC, that said that after doing much research, their conclusion was there is no such thing as a snuff film, nobody has actually made a snuff film, and there is no market for snuff films. Its just too difficult / costly to murder people for entertainment as opposed to doing fiction.
:P
SOMETIMES the world isn't as bad as it seems.
The very thought that content would have to be approved before getting sold to adults is chilling.
yeah, Orwell thought it was scary too. :) In all seriousness though, censorship is a problem.
Re-reading the summary, you're right, its extremely misleading. Lets toss out the summary AND the article! Bad /., bad!
The entire article should be thrown out, it doesn't say anything useful at all.
Also, if you thought that ANY solution of pancake flipping would win you a million dollars, you need to have your head examined. The problem obviously has more to it than that.
It took a bit to realize the problem is not sorting the pancakes, but finding the optimal sequence of flips to sort the pancakes.
If a trivially easy algorithm would win you the Millennium Prize, odds are you're not understanding the problem. We're talking about millions of dollars and world record status. If any first year CS 101 student could solve this, THEY WOULD HAVE. This stuff is cutting-edge science for a reason; its REALLY COMPLICATED. I don't get why this is so shocking -__- wow.
It is simply blowing my mind how many people do not get this. I thought /. was full of programmers and computer scientists? Guess not. Jeepers.
Doesn't help that TFA barely said ANYTHING about P vs NP at all, pretty much just said "hey guys, pancake algorithm is cool, read a description! Oh yeah, and some scientists somewhere proved something about this. Don't worry about that part."
Where's my turing award?
You've got a long, long way to go.
The fiddly part is that the question is what is the minimal number of flips required to sort the stack. Finding some number of flips that will sort the stack is fairly straightforward.
Yeah, exactly! People are completely misunderstanding and seem to think that a pancake sorting algorithm proves P = NP, which is just silly; ANY programmer worth his salt can write a pancake sorting algorithm right now trivially. Most of the comments on this page have absolutely nothing to do with computational complexity, and people are either arguing about the algorithm implementation or about syrup.
It doesn't help that TFA barely explained anything other than the pancake sorting algorithm. I'd like to know how you can check that X is the minimum number of flips for a given N pancakes in NP time. It seems to me like in order to verify that X is indeed the minimum number, you'd have to calculate the minimum number, thus putting this in P.
Its pancake sorting. Everybody's done it. Its like mergesort and towers of hanoi, its one of those trivially easy to understand problems that you learn when you're getting into programming that still requires a decent bit of logic to solve. Easy to understand, not so easy to implement.
:P
Doesn't mean that Gates' version was optimal, and certainly doesn't say anything about P vs NP
He's not saying they're the exact same. He's saying algorithmic-ally they're similar problems, and they are. In both you are modifying a set and then recursively modifying sub-sets of that set. The logic to working both out is very similar, even if in Hanoi you have 3 posts, and in pancakes just the 1 stack. In both, you are performing an operation (a move, or a flip) on a stack of elements, but then that operation will disturb the inner state of that set, so then you have to perform additional recursive operations to restore the state of the inner subset to the set.
Its like saying that mergesort and quicksort are similar. They are. They are also different.
There is a pancake flipping algorithm. Have you heard of it?
Seriously, pancake flipping has been around forever. Seriously, its one of the few algorithms that even Bill Gates has implemented: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancake_sorting#History And apparently the co-creator of Futurama has as well.
TFA mentions that they proved pancake flipping was NP-Hard. Cool. THATS IT. It doesn't explain how they got to this conclusion, it doesn't explain the significance, it doesn't extrapolate anything useful...
Cool story bro.
Uh, did we read the same article? Because what I just read barely explained the pancake flipping algorithm, and that's it. If you like the pancake algorithm, that's fine, but that has almost nothing to do with P vs NP other than the fact that it is AN example of A problem. The article didn't explain how they proved it was NP-Hard, they didn't explain what P vs NP is at all, they didn't explain why P vs NP is significant...
What exactly do you understand now that you didn't before?
Mathematics is complicated, unfortunately that's just the nature of it, there's no shortcuts. Sometimes ideas can be better communicated through metaphor, but I think you're gotten hung up on the pancakes and as a result you're missing the forest for the trees.
Yeah, pretty similar. Even the pancake flipping has been around since the 80s, lots of people have taken cracks at it. The interesting thing here is the P vs NP problem, which the paper barely even mentions and does not explain whatsoever.
But Windows doesn't innovate, and they don't think.
Amen, brother. I know M$-bashing gets some flak on /. for being everybody's favorite straw-man, but seriously, this OS is embarrassing. I can count the number of useful features they've added since 98SE on my left hand.
Too bad Microsoft hasn't REALLY embraced gaming, they're just competing with Sony for console hardware.
Windows 7 is still extremely naive about handling games. There should be options in the OS to disable the windows key when full-screen applications are running, windows should be MUCH better about recognizing games, Games For Windows Live is a JOKE (this I especially don't understand, Xbox Live is actually very impressive, and it should be EASIER to provide that kind of service on a PC. Gamespy has been doing it for FREE for years, but MS continually just releases a crap of DRM they call GFWL with no "features" a gamer would ever possibly use).
Bad news, nobody.
The amusing thing is AB is just a graphically updated version of the old games we used to play on c64 and apple ][e, where you selected an angle and velocity for your cannon, and fired a projectile at a target over polynomial generated mountains.
Depending upon how old you are, you're either talking about Artillery, Scorched Earth, or Worms. :) Great game. Scorched Earth was the one I got really into, and then worms is just silly and awesome.
Apple II makes it sound like the original Artillery.
That said, AB is actually simpler than Artillery even, you don't get to move and your positions aren't as random, there's no terrain making things interesting, and there's certainly none of the worms variety. Its almost more of a modern flash physics catapult game than a proper artillery game, and that might be where some of the hate comes from. Its an extremely limited game, very casual, to the point of being like bejeweled. Serious gamers don't want to hear Halo or Age of Empires being compared to bejeweled, because it seems to belittle their complex strategy and gaming experiences down into little repetitive toys.
Its all probably just a defense reaction to gaming being branded nerdy in the first place.
there are rituals and habits constructed around it. E.g., my best friend needs to smoke before grading tests (she doesn't smoke at other times).
You are describing a habit, not a physical addiction. The two have become completely muddied up in the common vernacular.
Picking your nose is a bad habit. Heroin is a physical addiction. You can find it difficult to stop picking your nose, but you don't get the shakes when you finally do.