...and there used to be a system called Meldex at the New Zealand Digital Library, but it seems to be gone now.
My opinion is that the technology is almost there right now - lots and lots of people are working on this problem - but the main thing lacking seems to be a searchable database of music that people actually want to search through, as opposed to the existing databases which mainly contain classical music and crappy MIDI files.
If you do have any cool ideas, especially about how to get the actual data to search through, or how to provide this service on the web without the RIAA sueing your ass off, I'd be interested to hear.
I can't believe how many people have posted things along the lines of "pay your dues", "shut up and quit whining" or "what'd you expect"?
In all of my internships, I always found a real project to do and did interesting work. And a lot of my friends did, too. You know how? By doing it.
My first internship was at RealNetworks (at the time called Progressive Networks). I knew how to program Macs, which was rare, so they put a Mac on my desk and told me to be a tester (I think my instructions were to keep clicking until it crashed). Well, I found a bug, but instead of reporting it, I opened up the code and tried to find it. I didn't understand the code, but instead of asking my boss, I found other engineers who were happy to answer my questions. And I found the bug. And about 35 memory leaks. Then I showed my boss that I had actually fixed those bugs and many others.
By the end of the summer I was given full responsibility for the new Installer Wizard and I also ported the first RealVideo proof-of-concept to the Mac.
You're going to have many bosses who don't know how to take advantage of you in such a way that you make a real contribution and learn, too. But others may have projects for you to do, and once you impress them they'll be more likely to give you a try.
Of course, you may have to do some menial labor, too. That's part of the job. But that doesn't mean that you can't also learn and have responsibility, too.
How can you say it's not worth the performance hit?
It agree that I can live without AA when I'm playing a game at 1280x1024 at 30 FPS. One frame doesn't stay still long enough for me to notice.
But it makes a huge difference when trying to read normal text at a small font size! Totally worth the speed difference there, which is negligible, for much prettier and more readable fonts.
Except that Aqua is a lot more than a skin. Aqua = full alpha-channel transparency of everything. Do you see any other OS with soft shadows around windows?
I know that I for one am planning to pay as long as Napster's database is larger than any other. As a jazz musician and arranger, I use Napster to listen to as many different recordings of the same song that I can find before writing a new arrangement of it or playing it in an ensemble. Since I'm often looking for relatively obscure songs, or else obscure recordings of well-known songs, an alternative system like OpenNap or Gnutella wouldn't be as much use until they have anywhere near the user base as Napster. Right now they seem to have primarily pop music. (Nothing wrong with pop music, it's just not what I'm usually looking for...)
I haven't heard anyone compare this to the transition to the Power Mac that Apple pulled off a few years ago. They did an amazing job with their 68K emulator, to the extent that the first 60 MHz PowerPC 601 chips could execute 68K code at about the same speed as a 40 MHz 68040. I think that's amazing performance! In fact, 90% of the software was still 68K code for the first couple of years.
It was extremely significant that the Power Mac emulated 68K code so well, because it meant that a bunch of old drivers and extensions written in assembly language didn't need to be rewritten. In fact, they ran so fast that many of them didn't get rewritten for years! Mac OS 8.0 still had lots of 68K code in it! (I think it's pretty much gone in Mac OS 9.0, but who knows?)
The fact is that there are a lot of programs that will never get recompiled for the Itanium. So if it can't execute all of those programs with any sort of speed, people will be discouraged from switching.
I'm currently using VMWare and I actually think it's very worth having. I'm developing cross-platform (Linux/Windows/Mac) software, and while I do 90% of the coding in Linux, I need to recompile the Windows version all the time. It's much faster to resume my VMWare session and do the Windows compile there than it is to reboot into Windows. Plus, I can continue using Linux while it compiles, and the system is totally responsive. When I'm done using Windows for a while, I can just suspend my VMWare session and free up all of its memory.
The other reason I use it is that there are still a fair number of fun web sites out there that only really work in IE. I do 90% of my browsing using Konqueror or Netscape in Linux, but if my AOL-using friend sends me a link to a cool game that requires a Windows plug-in, I like being able to check it out without having to reboot.
So I'm all in favor of Plex86. As soon as it can run VC++ and IE, I'll be switching.
What do you expect them to do? The company that was providing the free net access is going out of business. It's not like this is the first free net access company to bite the bullet recently.
Is the competition rough, or maybe are there just not all that many users who use Linux as a desktop OS and want a full-featured but not MS-compatible Office suite?
I installed it on my Mac last night, and it seems to work fine, except for one problem: it doesn't display any web pages! When I point it to Slashdot, it displays the advertising banner and nothing else! Other sites that fail include netscape.com and mozillazine.org. Anyone else have this problem?
Easy solution for your mp3's: put them in an encrypted file, or a password-protected partition. The inspectors have no right to look at any data files you have, so you wouldn't have to open it up for them. And it wouldn't get in the way of your daily mp3 playing.
What do you mean, you can't prove it? Either P=NP, or P!=NP. If you discover a polynomial-time algorithm to solve a problem which is NP-complete, and you can PROVE it always works and never takes more than polynomial time, then P=NP. Furthermore, the proof that such problem is NP-complete would give you a way to solve any NP problem in polynomial time, so it would be true in practice, not only in theory. This article just says that Minesweeper is NP-complete, which is not a major result.
The server had a pretty sophisticated script that would detect people who were attempting to download the entire book in bulk, and lock them out. It would have been difficult to get around, probably requiring a highly distributed "attack" over a long period of time.
It's clear you never saw the site, or the book. It's not the fact that it had a lot of equations that made it so great. It's the fact that every single one was hand-edited by Eric himself, and that the explanations are extremely clear as far as math books go. Not to mention the hundreds of illustrations, Mathematica source code, thousands of hyperlinks, and tens of thousands of bibliographic entries. A community of people could produce something containing more stuff (though that would take a while) but only with the dedication of a single person will you get a work so unified, complete, and consistent.
I have it in hardcover and sometimes open it up to a random page and read just for fun. For example, Eric's story of Fermat's Last Theorem is one of the most enjoyable, complete, and also concise descriptions I have ever read, and it's also totally accessible to someone with only a small background in math. Amazing!
If the previous post was correct about StarOffice comprising 9,000,000 lines of code, then it seems doubtful that it will be very easy to integrate any of it with a different project, like KOffice.
Keep in mind that StarOffice is big, slow, and buggy.
On the other hand, StarOffice does an impressive job of importing Micro$oft Office files, and so if they wrote that importing code in any sort of portable way at all, that could be very useful!
Re:Difference between NP-complete and NP-hard?
on
Does P = NP?
·
· Score: 2
NP-hard problems don't actually have to be in NP. I like to think of NP problems as those such that if you were given a solution, you could verify the solution in polynomial time. But there are some problems for which this is not the case, and yet it is still true that you could reduce any problem in NP to this problem.
In theory, an operating system can display any 256 colors, but your machine would take a real performance hit if it had to redraw its palette every time you toggled between applications. In theory, an operating system can display any 256 colors, but your machine would take a real performance hit if it had to redraw its palette every time you toggled between applications.
Well, I used to run "netscape -install" on my 8bit X server and that's exactly what it did.
Sure, on many operating systems, different programs swap in different palettes when different programs are in the foreground. On your 8-bit Xserver, netscape was swapping in its 216 favorite colors. The Mac's done this since 1987 and it still works great. But it wouldn't make sense for a web browser to swap in a new color palette for each new web page. Especially because then it would be impossible for two different sites to be displayed in different frames.
One of the most interesting things I learned in this article is how inconsistent web browsers are when attempting to render colors in 15 or 16-bit modes. I can imagine this happens because sloppy programmers might convert from an 8-bit number to a 5-bit number by doing a bit-shift, incorrectly ignoring the less significant bits.
This is a big deal, for example, if you need solid colors (like table BGCOLORS) seamlessly blending with GIF images. I can imagine this coming up sometimes, but not THAT often. Luckily they offered some suggestions to remedy this problem (like using a transparent color in your GIF where it blends with the background).
The authors of the article, however, seem to imply that one concern is that the colors people see are not the colors you intended for them to see. This is a different issue entirely! Just the fact that most monitors have brightness/contrast controls, plus the differences in gamma used by Macs and PCs, and other factors like this virtually guarantee that most users will not see exactly the color you intended.
In the article, the authors claim that when your monitor is in 15-bit mode, there are 32,768 colors it can display, and that these are chosen uniformly in a 32x32x32 quantization of RGB-space. This is correct. However, they also claim that none of these colors exist in true-color mode (except black and white and other pure colors) because, for example:
In 15-bit mode, the color (1,1,1) where each number is in the range 0-31 gives us about 3.23% gray.
In 24-bit mode, the closest colors you seem to have are (8,8,8) and (9,9,9) in the range 0-255 which correspond to 3.13% gray and 3.53% gray.
However, this assumes that at a hardware level, there is a difference in the signal being sent to the monitor between 3.23% and 3.13% for each color channel. Is that really the case? My guess would be that when you're in high color (15-bit) mode, each pixel gets translated to its nearest 24-bit equivalent inside of the video card before the signal sent to the monitor. This is almost certainly the case when the connection to the monitor is digital, like in some new flat-panel displays. Anybody know about this for sure?
Slashdot Mirror
- musedata.org
- themefinder.org
- ...and there used to be a system called Meldex at the New Zealand Digital Library, but it seems to be gone now.
My opinion is that the technology is almost there right now - lots and lots of people are working on this problem - but the main thing lacking seems to be a searchable database of music that people actually want to search through, as opposed to the existing databases which mainly contain classical music and crappy MIDI files.If you do have any cool ideas, especially about how to get the actual data to search through, or how to provide this service on the web without the RIAA sueing your ass off, I'd be interested to hear.
Not just companies, but free developers, too. You want everyone using your OS so that there will be more people writing apps and fixing bugs for it.
Apple charges for a new OS about once a year. So the upgrade this summer will be free, and then the version next year will cost ~$100 again.
Python Palm-platform ported!
Poster perusing preliminary press-release ponders programming Perl-free PDAs.
Preppie people prefer Python; Perl pedantic.
Python port "Pippy" passable? Possible. PythonLabs prepared port perfectly.
P2P Python programs particularly pleasant.
(Poster pitches "P"-filled post pre- particularly pernicious puns.)
I can't believe how many people have posted things along the lines of "pay your dues", "shut up and quit whining" or "what'd you expect"?
In all of my internships, I always found a real project to do and did interesting work. And a lot of my friends did, too. You know how? By doing it.
My first internship was at RealNetworks (at the time called Progressive Networks). I knew how to program Macs, which was rare, so they put a Mac on my desk and told me to be a tester (I think my instructions were to keep clicking until it crashed). Well, I found a bug, but instead of reporting it, I opened up the code and tried to find it. I didn't understand the code, but instead of asking my boss, I found other engineers who were happy to answer my questions. And I found the bug. And about 35 memory leaks. Then I showed my boss that I had actually fixed those bugs and many others.
By the end of the summer I was given full responsibility for the new Installer Wizard and I also ported the first RealVideo proof-of-concept to the Mac.
You're going to have many bosses who don't know how to take advantage of you in such a way that you make a real contribution and learn, too. But others may have projects for you to do, and once you impress them they'll be more likely to give you a try.
Of course, you may have to do some menial labor, too. That's part of the job. But that doesn't mean that you can't also learn and have responsibility, too.
How can you say it's not worth the performance hit?
It agree that I can live without AA when I'm playing a game at 1280x1024 at 30 FPS. One frame doesn't stay still long enough for me to notice.
But it makes a huge difference when trying to read normal text at a small font size! Totally worth the speed difference there, which is negligible, for much prettier and more readable fonts.
For a cross-platform, GPL'd multitrack sound editor, check out Audacity:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~music/audacity/
Except that Aqua is a lot more than a skin. Aqua = full alpha-channel transparency of everything. Do you see any other OS with soft shadows around windows?
I know that I for one am planning to pay as long as Napster's database is larger than any other. As a jazz musician and arranger, I use Napster to listen to as many different recordings of the same song that I can find before writing a new arrangement of it or playing it in an ensemble. Since I'm often looking for relatively obscure songs, or else obscure recordings of well-known songs, an alternative system like OpenNap or Gnutella wouldn't be as much use until they have anywhere near the user base as Napster. Right now they seem to have primarily pop music. (Nothing wrong with pop music, it's just not what I'm usually looking for...)
Styrofoam Peanuts are the ultimate packaging material. They can be used to package software for Linux, Windows, MacOS, *BSD, BeOS, and more.
I haven't heard anyone compare this to the transition to the Power Mac that Apple pulled off a few years ago. They did an amazing job with their 68K emulator, to the extent that the first 60 MHz PowerPC 601 chips could execute 68K code at about the same speed as a 40 MHz 68040. I think that's amazing performance! In fact, 90% of the software was still 68K code for the first couple of years.
It was extremely significant that the Power Mac emulated 68K code so well, because it meant that a bunch of old drivers and extensions written in assembly language didn't need to be rewritten. In fact, they ran so fast that many of them didn't get rewritten for years! Mac OS 8.0 still had lots of 68K code in it! (I think it's pretty much gone in Mac OS 9.0, but who knows?)
The fact is that there are a lot of programs that will never get recompiled for the Itanium. So if it can't execute all of those programs with any sort of speed, people will be discouraged from switching.
I'm currently using VMWare and I actually think it's very worth having. I'm developing cross-platform (Linux/Windows/Mac) software, and while I do 90% of the coding in Linux, I need to recompile the Windows version all the time. It's much faster to resume my VMWare session and do the Windows compile there than it is to reboot into Windows. Plus, I can continue using Linux while it compiles, and the system is totally responsive. When I'm done using Windows for a while, I can just suspend my VMWare session and free up all of its memory.
The other reason I use it is that there are still a fair number of fun web sites out there that only really work in IE. I do 90% of my browsing using Konqueror or Netscape in Linux, but if my AOL-using friend sends me a link to a cool game that requires a Windows plug-in, I like being able to check it out without having to reboot.
So I'm all in favor of Plex86. As soon as it can run VC++ and IE, I'll be switching.
What do you expect them to do? The company that was providing the free net access is going out of business. It's not like this is the first free net access company to bite the bullet recently.
Last I checked, you could do that with C++ too, if you just write a string class with operator overloading.
Is the competition rough, or maybe are there just not all that many users who use Linux as a desktop OS and want a full-featured but not MS-compatible Office suite?
I installed it on my Mac last night, and it seems to work fine, except for one problem: it doesn't display any web pages! When I point it to Slashdot, it displays the advertising banner and nothing else! Other sites that fail include netscape.com and mozillazine.org. Anyone else have this problem?
Easy solution for your mp3's: put them in an encrypted file, or a password-protected partition. The inspectors have no right to look at any data files you have, so you wouldn't have to open it up for them. And it wouldn't get in the way of your daily mp3 playing.
What do you mean, you can't prove it? Either P=NP, or P!=NP. If you discover a polynomial-time algorithm to solve a problem which is NP-complete, and you can PROVE it always works and never takes more than polynomial time, then P=NP. Furthermore, the proof that such problem is NP-complete would give you a way to solve any NP problem in polynomial time, so it would be true in practice, not only in theory. This article just says that Minesweeper is NP-complete, which is not a major result.
The server had a pretty sophisticated script that would detect people who were attempting to download the entire book in bulk, and lock them out. It would have been difficult to get around, probably requiring a highly distributed "attack" over a long period of time.
It's clear you never saw the site, or the book. It's not the fact that it had a lot of equations that made it so great. It's the fact that every single one was hand-edited by Eric himself, and that the explanations are extremely clear as far as math books go. Not to mention the hundreds of illustrations, Mathematica source code, thousands of hyperlinks, and tens of thousands of bibliographic entries. A community of people could produce something containing more stuff (though that would take a while) but only with the dedication of a single person will you get a work so unified, complete, and consistent.
I have it in hardcover and sometimes open it up to a random page and read just for fun. For example, Eric's story of Fermat's Last Theorem is one of the most enjoyable, complete, and also concise descriptions I have ever read, and it's also totally accessible to someone with only a small background in math. Amazing!
If the previous post was correct about StarOffice comprising 9,000,000 lines of code, then it seems doubtful that it will be very easy to integrate any of it with a different project, like KOffice.
Keep in mind that StarOffice is big, slow, and buggy.
On the other hand, StarOffice does an impressive job of importing Micro$oft Office files, and so if they wrote that importing code in any sort of portable way at all, that could be very useful!
NP-hard problems don't actually have to be in NP. I like to think of NP problems as those such that if you were given a solution, you could verify the solution in polynomial time. But there are some problems for which this is not the case, and yet it is still true that you could reduce any problem in NP to this problem.
Well, I used to run "netscape -install" on my 8bit X server and that's exactly what it did.
Sure, on many operating systems, different programs swap in different palettes when different programs are in the foreground. On your 8-bit Xserver, netscape was swapping in its 216 favorite colors. The Mac's done this since 1987 and it still works great. But it wouldn't make sense for a web browser to swap in a new color palette for each new web page. Especially because then it would be impossible for two different sites to be displayed in different frames.
One of the most interesting things I learned in this article is how inconsistent web browsers are when attempting to render colors in 15 or 16-bit modes. I can imagine this happens because sloppy programmers might convert from an 8-bit number to a 5-bit number by doing a bit-shift, incorrectly ignoring the less significant bits.
This is a big deal, for example, if you need solid colors (like table BGCOLORS) seamlessly blending with GIF images. I can imagine this coming up sometimes, but not THAT often. Luckily they offered some suggestions to remedy this problem (like using a transparent color in your GIF where it blends with the background).
The authors of the article, however, seem to imply that one concern is that the colors people see are not the colors you intended for them to see. This is a different issue entirely! Just the fact that most monitors have brightness/contrast controls, plus the differences in gamma used by Macs and PCs, and other factors like this virtually guarantee that most users will not see exactly the color you intended.
In the article, the authors claim that when your monitor is in 15-bit mode, there are 32,768 colors it can display, and that these are chosen uniformly in a 32x32x32 quantization of RGB-space. This is correct. However, they also claim that none of these colors exist in true-color mode (except black and white and other pure colors) because, for example:
In 15-bit mode, the color (1,1,1) where each number is in the range 0-31 gives us about 3.23% gray.
In 24-bit mode, the closest colors you seem to have are (8,8,8) and (9,9,9) in the range 0-255 which correspond to 3.13% gray and 3.53% gray.
However, this assumes that at a hardware level, there is a difference in the signal being sent to the monitor between 3.23% and 3.13% for each color channel. Is that really the case? My guess would be that when you're in high color (15-bit) mode, each pixel gets translated to its nearest 24-bit equivalent inside of the video card before the signal sent to the monitor. This is almost certainly the case when the connection to the monitor is digital, like in some new flat-panel displays. Anybody know about this for sure?