I'm sure we'll soon have a science of fun, the studies are not there yet, but I'm certain we'd find statistical consensus of what fun is, and what isn't interesting if we had many decades to do serious research.
It's called "ludology", and there already is decades of research and tons of papers and books written about it. Jesper Juul's "Half Real" is a good starting point, which largely looks at previous research in the field and relates it specifically to video games.
I should note that I disagree with him on some points, and some of that is due to the fact that you're just dead wrong about entertainment/fun not being subjective. For example, I find chess and baseball both incredibly dull, and would happily never play either of them if my daughter wasn't totally fascinated by them.
Yes, I'm sure it's possible to find some "statistical consensus of what fun is", and I'm equally sure it will of similar quality to the consensus being arrived at in politics: barely palatable, but not quite so bad that the voters/market openly revolt.
Swapping rows or columns and rotating the puzzle both keep it valid.
Rotation would keep it valid, but swapping may not. My understanding of sudoku is that you are restricted by the box (sub-matrix?) also, not just the rows and columns.
In the sample sudoku posted above, if you swap columns 3 and 4 you will have an invalid puzzle since, for example, the upper left square will have two 1's and no 9's.
It's posts like this that make me sad about the/. mod system. One of the most cogent and succinct political arguments I've read in a long time, modded as a troll...
But hey, at least I had the foresight to put you on my friends list so I got to read it anyway.
The 8080As I used in my first asm class ran at 75kHz. I don't remember exactly, but I'm pretty sure the Z80s we had were clocked considerably under 4MHz, especially considering the 8088-based PC I had only ran at 3MHz.
Also interesting to note how employee loyalty decreased as companies' IP and other legal protections increased...
I seriously doubt that's anything but coincidence. Employee loyalty decreased as a reaction to the decrease in company loyalty to the employees. Increased IP and other legal protections for companies are just another symptom of American Corporatism running amok.
If it weren't for the fact that advancement happened before IP ever existed, I might agree with you.
Indeed it did, but very slowly, because back then most research was treated as what we now call Trade Secrets. If I wanted to have a monopoly on, say, Damascus blades, then I kept the methods of making them a secret. this might benefit me personally, but overall innovation was pretty stagnant due to the lack of sharing.
lack of sharing information is one of the things modern IP was actually designed to address; in return for publishing your design (in the form of a patent), you get a temporary monopoly on producing it. That's actually a pretty good idea!
Now, I will fully agree that our current IP system is broken, but I don't think doing away with it completely is warranted. Rather, I think it needs to be adjusted to better suit the current pace of innovation. Five year patents would work just fine, I think. And the USPTO needs to learn that just because something is now done on a computer, that doesn't make it new, special, or patentable (algorithms!).
On the copyright side, it should go back to, say, 10 years, with the option to extend, for a fee. I propose that one should be able to extend copyright an unlimited number of times, with the fee starting at $1000 for the first extension and doubling for every extension thereafter (numbers adjusted for inflation, of course). That way Disney can have their perpetual Mickey Mouse copyright, but other "less valuable" creations will revert to the public domain like they should.
Personally, I'd prefer it government kept its heavy handed, corrupt influence from as much as possible.
Government may be corrupted, but it is not the source of corruption. So, what is the source? Typically special interest groups with lots of money, such as large pharmaceutical companies.
Why aren't white people who leave their countries to emigrate, moving to shitholes like Africa or India?
Because they are shitholes. Seriously, I know plenty of white people who have emigrated to non-white places that are not shitholes, like Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan...
As for myself, I am as white as they come, yet I've found that I prefer the company of Asians (and not just the women) over that of my own ethnic group, the "typical white American".
"Throw the bums out" is my default voting policy, and I recommend everyone take that position.
What I mean is that I always vote against the incumbent unless I can think of at least one specific thing they've done that represented my interests.
For the record, I can't remember the last time I voted for an incumbent. If I do, by some small chance, end up in a situation where I can think of something they've done that was in my interests, I would still have to balance it against what they've done that was against my interests, and I don't expect any of them to come out ahead in that comparison.
Looking at the ProtoBuf documentation (lightly) it looks like stuff that any lazy programmer has implemented to make their life easier.
I think the question is, then, how do you know this isn't just a cleaned-up, better engineered version of the same stuff all their programmers already had in their own toolboxes? It might not have taken that much additional work to put it together. IIRC, Google encourages their employees to spend some time every week working on their own stuff, so this could just be one of the many cool things to come out of that policy.
The thing that you seem to be missing is that Not-Invented-Here is sometimes the same as Not-Right_For_Our_Application.
Yes, a variety of filesystems exist, but it could easily be the case that none of them are optimal for what Google needs to do. Google pushes around A LOT of data, and I'm guess it's mostly of a similar type (format, file size, etc), so it makes sense for them to create a filesystem that is optimized fort exactly the type of files they use. Most filesystems are general purpose, which means they are a compromise. They won't get optimal performance for any given file type, but the performance also shouldn't completely blow.
Similarly, relational databases are not the ultimate magic-bullet database solution. They are pretty good in most cases, and thus they make an excellent general purpose solution, but if you know, or even better can control, exactly what types of data you will be putting into your database, you can create a database engine that will easily outperform existing generalized solutions.
For the amount of data Google has to deal with, I'm willing to bet that the efficiency they're gaining from these customized solutions is well worth the effort of developing them. Let's say their non-relational database means they can get the job done with 10% fewer CPUs. How much money do you think that saves them in a year?
Actually, yes. You seem to have some misconceptions about what optimal conditions are for solar panels. For example, they lose efficiency when they get hot, so having some sort of cooling (like air flow from being on top of a moving car) will boost their efficiency.
That's irrelevant to the current discussion though, because Tesla is not putting solar panels on the roof of their car. They're putting solar panels on the roof of your house.
I had the same experience. I managed to learn proper sentence structure anyway, but that was mostly due to the luck of having reasonably educated parents and a house full of books written by people who knew how to write.
I actually am learning all that stuff now, oddly as a result of tutoring math at the local junior college. I seem to meet a lot of beautiful Asian women who need help with English.
There's a lot of computer related tech research coming out of China and Korea these days, and I would expect both countries to grow in those areas. If you're learning a language for professional reasons either would be good.
I used to work for another company that made similar products. There are all kinds of useful things you can do with these things.
Actually, I think the simplest use I saw was for simple metering. We sold a ton of them to the city of Abu Dhabi for that purpose. They didn't have to hire meter readers because the meters reported usage on their own. It would have been pretty simple for them to implement access control as well, but I don't know if they did.
The more interesting uses involved hooking up various sensors to the device. For example, you could use it to maintain a certain level of soil moisture, or automatically respond to frost conditions.
Anyway, I don't know about the company in TFA, but we used cellular sideband for wireless data. We had a variety of other comm options as well, like RS232/485 and IR, but probably none of those would would have been useful in this case.
You let me know when American soldiers start planting bombs timed for rush hour in London and Spain. You let me know when American soldiers start planting bombs to kill random civilians in Iraq, with follow-on bombs to kill first-responders. You let me know when American soldiers start cutting the heads off captives with swords, video tape it, and post the tapes to the Internet.
Isn't this a straw man?
No, it isn't. When the man says "the rules of war have always been their own," that is exactly the kind of behavior he's talking about.
I don't claim that our soldiers are behaving in the same way as some of our enemies do. However, it's difficult to feel that we are maintaining a moral high ground when our military maintains a base like Guantanamo bay, where the CIA kidnaps people for extraordinary rendition, and so on. Waterboarding is torture. Yes, it's not on the same level as putting molten glass in the urethra, or on the same level as random amputations, the rack, the wheel, or other such torturedevices, but it IS torture, and it makes us a nation of hypocrites if we condone it. This is on top of the fact that any information given while tortured is what the prisoner things the torturer wants to hear. I'd confess to having a third kidney, or of having been Hitler's butler if I were tortured -- though clearly neither are true. So, there's NO value for subjecting people to such things.
If there were really as little value in the information as you claim, we wouldn't be doing these things. The fact is that a great deal of useful information has been gained this way. More importantly, it has been gained quickly enough to be useful. If you know of a non-torture method for getting information out of a prisoner that's as quick and effective as waterboarding, I'm sure that interrogators around the world would be very interested in hearing about it.
The simple answer is because China is behaving like an aggressor, and has been actively aggressive in cyberspace.
Also, the Sino-Vietnamese war is not the only war that's ever happened between China and Vietnam, only the most recent. Vietnam has been fighting off China periodically ever since they won their independence from China roughly 1000 years ago, and they're quite proud of it (justifiably, IMO).
The "lesson" learned is generally applicable to all regions of the world. The Vietnamese are, in my experience, generally friendly, playful, and energetic. They are also a scrappy bunch, and if you mess with them they will fuck you up. Tibet has proven to be the opposite. The invasion was quite easy, and while the PRC has failed to win hearts and minds there, mostly because they stupidly insist on messing with their religion, they have had very little trouble maintaining control in the region.
You clearly haven't known any bad boys, or watched how they operate. Most of them do not get girls by pretending to be nice, stable guys. In fact, most nice guys will get a lot more attention from girls if they pretend to be unstable and not-so-nice.
Girls are often attracted to that element of danger, for the same reason people like to ride roller coasters.
Additionally, those girls who really do believe that they want a nice guy frequently delude themselves into thinking that their love will be enough to turn the bad boy, who excites them, into a nice guy, who will be faithful and caring.
My experience with middle-eastern women is that they have very fiery tempers. I haven't dated any, mind you, but I am friends with a few of them. In my opinion middle-eastern women are among the most beautiful women in the world, but too psychotic for my tastes.
Too bad I can't say that around women, because they tend to translate that into "I want a weak woman to dominate, LOL."
I've noticed that too, and at this point I find it hilarious. It's the sort of thing that could only be said by someone who doesn't actually know any Asian women. In my experience, Asian women are much stronger than American women. In fact, I would go so far as to say that Asian women are actually strong, whereas American women are just bitchy.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure we'll soon have a science of fun, the studies are not there yet, but I'm certain we'd find statistical consensus of what fun is, and what isn't interesting if we had many decades to do serious research.
It's called "ludology", and there already is decades of research and tons of papers and books written about it. Jesper Juul's "Half Real" is a good starting point, which largely looks at previous research in the field and relates it specifically to video games.
I should note that I disagree with him on some points, and some of that is due to the fact that you're just dead wrong about entertainment/fun not being subjective. For example, I find chess and baseball both incredibly dull, and would happily never play either of them if my daughter wasn't totally fascinated by them.
Yes, I'm sure it's possible to find some "statistical consensus of what fun is", and I'm equally sure it will of similar quality to the consensus being arrived at in politics: barely palatable, but not quite so bad that the voters/market openly revolt.
Swapping rows or columns and rotating the puzzle both keep it valid.
Rotation would keep it valid, but swapping may not. My understanding of sudoku is that you are restricted by the box (sub-matrix?) also, not just the rows and columns.
In the sample sudoku posted above, if you swap columns 3 and 4 you will have an invalid puzzle since, for example, the upper left square will have two 1's and no 9's.
It's posts like this that make me sad about the /. mod system. One of the most cogent and succinct political arguments I've read in a long time, modded as a troll...
But hey, at least I had the foresight to put you on my friends list so I got to read it anyway.
The 8080As I used in my first asm class ran at 75kHz. I don't remember exactly, but I'm pretty sure the Z80s we had were clocked considerably under 4MHz, especially considering the 8088-based PC I had only ran at 3MHz.
Also interesting to note how employee loyalty decreased as companies' IP and other legal protections increased...
I seriously doubt that's anything but coincidence. Employee loyalty decreased as a reaction to the decrease in company loyalty to the employees. Increased IP and other legal protections for companies are just another symptom of American Corporatism running amok.
If it weren't for the fact that advancement happened before IP ever existed, I might agree with you.
Indeed it did, but very slowly, because back then most research was treated as what we now call Trade Secrets. If I wanted to have a monopoly on, say, Damascus blades, then I kept the methods of making them a secret. this might benefit me personally, but overall innovation was pretty stagnant due to the lack of sharing.
lack of sharing information is one of the things modern IP was actually designed to address; in return for publishing your design (in the form of a patent), you get a temporary monopoly on producing it. That's actually a pretty good idea!
Now, I will fully agree that our current IP system is broken, but I don't think doing away with it completely is warranted. Rather, I think it needs to be adjusted to better suit the current pace of innovation. Five year patents would work just fine, I think. And the USPTO needs to learn that just because something is now done on a computer, that doesn't make it new, special, or patentable (algorithms!).
On the copyright side, it should go back to, say, 10 years, with the option to extend, for a fee. I propose that one should be able to extend copyright an unlimited number of times, with the fee starting at $1000 for the first extension and doubling for every extension thereafter (numbers adjusted for inflation, of course). That way Disney can have their perpetual Mickey Mouse copyright, but other "less valuable" creations will revert to the public domain like they should.
Personally, I'd prefer it government kept its heavy handed, corrupt influence from as much as possible.
Government may be corrupted, but it is not the source of corruption. So, what is the source? Typically special interest groups with lots of money, such as large pharmaceutical companies.
So, who's influence is corrupt, again?
Why aren't white people who leave their countries to emigrate, moving to shitholes like Africa or India?
Because they are shitholes. Seriously, I know plenty of white people who have emigrated to non-white places that are not shitholes, like Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan...
As for myself, I am as white as they come, yet I've found that I prefer the company of Asians (and not just the women) over that of my own ethnic group, the "typical white American".
"Throw the bums out" is my default voting policy, and I recommend everyone take that position.
What I mean is that I always vote against the incumbent unless I can think of at least one specific thing they've done that represented my interests.
For the record, I can't remember the last time I voted for an incumbent. If I do, by some small chance, end up in a situation where I can think of something they've done that was in my interests, I would still have to balance it against what they've done that was against my interests, and I don't expect any of them to come out ahead in that comparison.
Clearly the lack of protein affects their neural functions.
On a more serious note, though, isn't there a statute of limitations of defamation lawsuits?
Again, the judge only needs to be involved if the owner, or an authorized agent thereof, is not able or willing to give permission.
I think if you look up the legal definition of "agency", you'll find that your entire argument is baseless.
Looking at the ProtoBuf documentation (lightly) it looks like stuff that any lazy programmer has implemented to make their life easier.
I think the question is, then, how do you know this isn't just a cleaned-up, better engineered version of the same stuff all their programmers already had in their own toolboxes? It might not have taken that much additional work to put it together. IIRC, Google encourages their employees to spend some time every week working on their own stuff, so this could just be one of the many cool things to come out of that policy.
The thing that you seem to be missing is that Not-Invented-Here is sometimes the same as Not-Right_For_Our_Application.
Yes, a variety of filesystems exist, but it could easily be the case that none of them are optimal for what Google needs to do. Google pushes around A LOT of data, and I'm guess it's mostly of a similar type (format, file size, etc), so it makes sense for them to create a filesystem that is optimized fort exactly the type of files they use. Most filesystems are general purpose, which means they are a compromise. They won't get optimal performance for any given file type, but the performance also shouldn't completely blow.
Similarly, relational databases are not the ultimate magic-bullet database solution. They are pretty good in most cases, and thus they make an excellent general purpose solution, but if you know, or even better can control, exactly what types of data you will be putting into your database, you can create a database engine that will easily outperform existing generalized solutions.
For the amount of data Google has to deal with, I'm willing to bet that the efficiency they're gaining from these customized solutions is well worth the effort of developing them. Let's say their non-relational database means they can get the job done with 10% fewer CPUs. How much money do you think that saves them in a year?
Actually, yes. You seem to have some misconceptions about what optimal conditions are for solar panels. For example, they lose efficiency when they get hot, so having some sort of cooling (like air flow from being on top of a moving car) will boost their efficiency.
That's irrelevant to the current discussion though, because Tesla is not putting solar panels on the roof of their car. They're putting solar panels on the roof of your house.
I had the same experience. I managed to learn proper sentence structure anyway, but that was mostly due to the luck of having reasonably educated parents and a house full of books written by people who knew how to write.
I actually am learning all that stuff now, oddly as a result of tutoring math at the local junior college. I seem to meet a lot of beautiful Asian women who need help with English.
Then how come the vowel in the first syllable is pronounced different from the vowel in the second one, yet they're spelled with the same letter?
Because you're pronouncing it wrong. The second vowel should be pronounced the same as the first.
There's a lot of computer related tech research coming out of China and Korea these days, and I would expect both countries to grow in those areas. If you're learning a language for professional reasons either would be good.
Ah, I was under the impression that they were being held as prisoners of war. It all makes much more sense to me now. Thank you.
I used to work for another company that made similar products. There are all kinds of useful things you can do with these things.
Actually, I think the simplest use I saw was for simple metering. We sold a ton of them to the city of Abu Dhabi for that purpose. They didn't have to hire meter readers because the meters reported usage on their own. It would have been pretty simple for them to implement access control as well, but I don't know if they did.
The more interesting uses involved hooking up various sensors to the device. For example, you could use it to maintain a certain level of soil moisture, or automatically respond to frost conditions.
Anyway, I don't know about the company in TFA, but we used cellular sideband for wireless data. We had a variety of other comm options as well, like RS232/485 and IR, but probably none of those would would have been useful in this case.
Isn't this a straw man?
No, it isn't. When the man says "the rules of war have always been their own," that is exactly the kind of behavior he's talking about.
I don't claim that our soldiers are behaving in the same way as some of our enemies do. However, it's difficult to feel that we are maintaining a moral high ground when our military maintains a base like Guantanamo bay, where the CIA kidnaps people for extraordinary rendition, and so on. Waterboarding is torture. Yes, it's not on the same level as putting molten glass in the urethra, or on the same level as random amputations, the rack, the wheel, or other such torturedevices, but it IS torture, and it makes us a nation of hypocrites if we condone it. This is on top of the fact that any information given while tortured is what the prisoner things the torturer wants to hear. I'd confess to having a third kidney, or of having been Hitler's butler if I were tortured -- though clearly neither are true. So, there's NO value for subjecting people to such things.
If there were really as little value in the information as you claim, we wouldn't be doing these things. The fact is that a great deal of useful information has been gained this way. More importantly, it has been gained quickly enough to be useful. If you know of a non-torture method for getting information out of a prisoner that's as quick and effective as waterboarding, I'm sure that interrogators around the world would be very interested in hearing about it.
Please explain how the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay are being treated inhumanely.
The simple answer is because China is behaving like an aggressor, and has been actively aggressive in cyberspace.
Also, the Sino-Vietnamese war is not the only war that's ever happened between China and Vietnam, only the most recent. Vietnam has been fighting off China periodically ever since they won their independence from China roughly 1000 years ago, and they're quite proud of it (justifiably, IMO).
The "lesson" learned is generally applicable to all regions of the world. The Vietnamese are, in my experience, generally friendly, playful, and energetic. They are also a scrappy bunch, and if you mess with them they will fuck you up. Tibet has proven to be the opposite. The invasion was quite easy, and while the PRC has failed to win hearts and minds there, mostly because they stupidly insist on messing with their religion, they have had very little trouble maintaining control in the region.
You clearly haven't known any bad boys, or watched how they operate. Most of them do not get girls by pretending to be nice, stable guys. In fact, most nice guys will get a lot more attention from girls if they pretend to be unstable and not-so-nice.
Girls are often attracted to that element of danger, for the same reason people like to ride roller coasters.
Additionally, those girls who really do believe that they want a nice guy frequently delude themselves into thinking that their love will be enough to turn the bad boy, who excites them, into a nice guy, who will be faithful and caring.
My experience with middle-eastern women is that they have very fiery tempers. I haven't dated any, mind you, but I am friends with a few of them. In my opinion middle-eastern women are among the most beautiful women in the world, but too psychotic for my tastes.
Too bad I can't say that around women, because they tend to translate that into "I want a weak woman to dominate, LOL."
I've noticed that too, and at this point I find it hilarious. It's the sort of thing that could only be said by someone who doesn't actually know any Asian women. In my experience, Asian women are much stronger than American women. In fact, I would go so far as to say that Asian women are actually strong, whereas American women are just bitchy.