The Cauchy isn't meaningless!... It's fat-tailed, and has infinite mean and variance
Not meaningless. Meanless. Yes, I know that "meanless" is most commonly used on the Internet as a misspelling for "meaningless", but here I'm only stating that Cauchy has no (finite) mean.
I think that I would have answered that: "Symmetric, uni-modal distributions are like that"
Granted.
I think that any distribution which has mean, median and mode the same will be symmetric and uni-modal. If anyone can think of a counter-example, I'd certainly like to hear it.
Unimodal yes, symmetric no. Imagine the vector [2,3,3,2,5,3,2,2,3]/15 interpreted as a discrete distribution. (That is, P(0) = 2/15, P(1) = 3/15, etc.) Mean, Median, and Mode will equal 4 (P(4) = 5/15).
I have not heard of any instances of marketeering guffbags and manglement ruining code, primarily because they don't code.
They ruin the code by ruining the requirements. In a firm that produces mass-market software, the marketing department generally writes each product's requirements document. If resistance to buffer overflow attacks isn't specified as a must-have in the requirements document, then it will surely get cut at the last minute in favor of other requirements such as ship date.
Topic: Migration to Linux (and possibly from Mac OS)
I mean, it's not like it takes too many switches to do a gcc ProTools.c on one architecture over the other does it?
If the developers of Pro Tools ported their app from the Mac OS X platform to the Windows platform or to the Linux/i686 platform, they would have to either rewrite or emulate the PowerPC assembly language inner loops.
Perhaps we'll find out whether it's the hardware architecture or the operating system that's limited productive creative applications sooner than we think.
Do you really think Intel's SSE2 is better than Motorola's AltiVec?
Identify the class of distributions for which mean, median and mode are the same
Symmetric distributions are like that. Others may exist.
and give three (non-normal) examples. At least one should NOT be in the exponential family.
Student t distributions (other than the meanless Cauchy distribution), the Laplacian distribution (exponential reflected about the mean axis, which occurs often in image compression), and the sum of 2 <= n < infinity independent random variables uniformly distributed in the same domain (case n = 2 is a triangular distribution; case n = infinity is the normal distribution; n cannot be 1 because a uniform distribution has no well defined mode). In addition to these continuous examples, I could give any number of discrete examples.
Can the sample at hand be considered a member of that class? Answer true or false, and support the answer.
False in theory but true in practice. Intelligence quotient distribution is not strictly normal because a normal distribution has support over the entire real line, but IQ cannot be less than zero. However, it appears roughly normal throughout plus or minus three standard deviations.
ObMigrationToLinux: I'm a bit curious about the distribution of market capitalizations of companies that have recently migrated their servers to the Linux operating system.
Speaking of distributions, which distribution is most popular among Linux users who migrated from BSD? Is it Slackware?
If I had to wait 47 seconds *per picture* something would be bouncing off the wall.
That "something" would probably be the grenade launcher rounds in Quake III Arena, which you move to the foreground while the camera uploads your last 20 pictures in the background.
No, jmu1 is not thinking of trademarks but rather of "laches". If you don't sue for a number of years, creating an unreasonable delay that harmed the alleged infringer, you may lose the right to collect damages for infringements that occurred before the suit was filed.
music drm -> copyright licenses -> pricing for replacement copies -> pricing for visual c++
I just saw C++.NET at Best Buy for like $79
The $79 per seat price applies only to the toy compiler that might as well be an interpreter, not to the C++ optimizing compiler. The optimizing compiler is available only as part of Visual Studio.NET ($1,079).
Try looking at the 68K instruction set, or the Z8000 (or Z80000) instruction set. Nice orthogonal instruction sets, no special purpose registers (except for the stack pointer - A7 and R15/RR14 respectively).
Even better, look at the ARM instruction set. Every instruction can be conditionally executed based on the same flags that other archs (6502, 68000, ppc, x86, etc) use for branches. Heck, even the program counter is a general purpose register. If you want to learn on a simple ARM machine, start here.
I'd like to publish source eventually but I'm wary of having it stolen and then getting sued by someone else claiming it's "theirs"
Don't worry. Here's all you have to do to prove that you possessed a file:
Package your source distribution as a gzip'd tarball.
Compute the MD5 or SHA-1 hash of that tarball.
Send the ascii-armored hash to a digital notary, which will digitally sign it and date it.
Save your hash.
When accused of plagiarism, verify the notary's signature. Now you have proof that you sent that file's hash on that date, which proves in turn that you possessed the file on that date.
Ever read the short story Melancholy Elephants [baen.com]?
I have. It's especially terrifying when taken along with the fact that a fellow can get sued for copying a four note melody from an existing song, and that there exist fewer than 50,000 such melodies.
when someone else in the future figures out how to make a bona-fide cloaking device (complete with that awesome Romulan warbird cloaking sound), he'll charge them a licensing fee for their design because he already patented the basic idea.
In that case, it's called gambling. Patents last 20 years after filing in most jurisdictions because the late Sonny "Treehugger" Bono never managed to touch patents. Thus, Ray Alden is making a bet that a cloaking device will be developed within the next twenty years.
what if it's only, say, 10% functional? Not at all useful
Except for a well-done camouflage suit, where a little goes a long way.
Atari gave us some much of joy! Too bad it's dead now
If Atari is so dead, then who published Neverwinter Nights? At least one of the two Atari companies is alive and kicking as part of Infogrames. (The other got bought by a hard drive maker.)
No I don't. I remember the Sadmind worm that spread among Solaris machines and defaced IIS machines with "fuck USA Government fuck PoizonBOx" and a.com.cn e-mail address, and I remember some other worm (Code Red?) that jokes "Welcome to www.worm.com! Hacked by Chinese!" on pages it defaces hosted on servers running USA Windows.
Oh wait, after a quick search of the web, I find that somebody patched Code Red to use a slight variation of the Sadmind worm's payload: "fuck CHINA Government fuck PoizonBOx".
No, but there's no reason for that to be true. Carbon is almost precisely the subset of Mac Toolbox that was included in QuickTime for Windows. Yes, Apple wrote a Mac source compatibility layer to port its media layer.
When I go the other way around (because of my assumption that I'm too lazy to intelligently combine opcodes)
Transmeta's Crusoe processor, which uses a Code Morphing emulation front-end to run x86 software, does intelligently combine opcodes. So does HP's similar Dynamo technology.
Whenever an underpowered but inexpensive computing device is released, many Anonymous Cowards suggest that a fellow could turn a cluster of such devices into a supercomputer. Most of the time, such posters refer to the Beowulf clustering project. Exhibit A, the most common form of the joke:
Subject:
Can you imagine...
Comment ...a Beowulf cluster of these?
The joke has been old for several years.
So brondsem asked: "would a beowulf cluster [of self-organizing circuits] create the Internet?" I'm still not sure what (s)he meant by that, as Al Gore created the commercialized Internet.
mod: -1, Offtopic. metamod: -1, Redundant.
Codecs change. Give Apple benefit of the doubt.
on
Animatrix Trailer
·
· Score: 1
Did they make the trailers blank at the start to get people to upgrade their Quick time?
Not necessarily. Perhaps the older Sorenson Video codec included with QuickTime 3 and 4 would introduce horrible artifacts that would shine a negative light on the cinematic quality of the first 20 seconds of the trailer.
Slashdot Mirror
The Cauchy isn't meaningless! ... It's fat-tailed, and has infinite mean and variance
Not meaningless. Meanless. Yes, I know that "meanless" is most commonly used on the Internet as a misspelling for "meaningless", but here I'm only stating that Cauchy has no (finite) mean.
I think that I would have answered that: "Symmetric, uni-modal distributions are like that"
Granted.
I think that any distribution which has mean, median and mode the same will be symmetric and uni-modal. If anyone can think of a counter-example, I'd certainly like to hear it.
Unimodal yes, symmetric no. Imagine the vector [2,3,3,2,5,3,2,2,3]/15 interpreted as a discrete distribution. (That is, P(0) = 2/15, P(1) = 3/15, etc.) Mean, Median, and Mode will equal 4 (P(4) = 5/15).
I have not heard of any instances of marketeering guffbags and manglement ruining code, primarily because they don't code.
They ruin the code by ruining the requirements. In a firm that produces mass-market software, the marketing department generally writes each product's requirements document. If resistance to buffer overflow attacks isn't specified as a must-have in the requirements document, then it will surely get cut at the last minute in favor of other requirements such as ship date.
Topic: Migration to Linux (and possibly from Mac OS)
I mean, it's not like it takes too many switches to do a gcc ProTools.c on one architecture over the other does it?
If the developers of Pro Tools ported their app from the Mac OS X platform to the Windows platform or to the Linux/i686 platform, they would have to either rewrite or emulate the PowerPC assembly language inner loops.
Perhaps we'll find out whether it's the hardware architecture or the operating system that's limited productive creative applications sooner than we think.
Do you really think Intel's SSE2 is better than Motorola's AltiVec?
Identify the class of distributions for which mean, median and mode are the same
Symmetric distributions are like that. Others may exist.
and give three (non-normal) examples. At least one should NOT be in the exponential family.
Student t distributions (other than the meanless Cauchy distribution), the Laplacian distribution (exponential reflected about the mean axis, which occurs often in image compression), and the sum of 2 <= n < infinity independent random variables uniformly distributed in the same domain (case n = 2 is a triangular distribution; case n = infinity is the normal distribution; n cannot be 1 because a uniform distribution has no well defined mode). In addition to these continuous examples, I could give any number of discrete examples.
Can the sample at hand be considered a member of that class? Answer true or false, and support the answer.
False in theory but true in practice. Intelligence quotient distribution is not strictly normal because a normal distribution has support over the entire real line, but IQ cannot be less than zero. However, it appears roughly normal throughout plus or minus three standard deviations.
ObMigrationToLinux: I'm a bit curious about the distribution of market capitalizations of companies that have recently migrated their servers to the Linux operating system.
Speaking of distributions, which distribution is most popular among Linux users who migrated from BSD? Is it Slackware?
Any Pocket PC could blow those machines away - and yet we see no good packages for pocket devices. You'd think there'd be a need wouldn't you?
TI-89 calculators run a trimmed down version of the Derive(tm) computer algebra package.
TI-34 ... discontinued
I swear by my TI-36x calculator. When in hexadecimal mode, it changes the trig keys into A-F keys.
If I had to wait 47 seconds *per picture* something would be bouncing off the wall.
That "something" would probably be the grenade launcher rounds in Quake III Arena, which you move to the foreground while the camera uploads your last 20 pictures in the background.
No, jmu1 is not thinking of trademarks but rather of "laches". If you don't sue for a number of years, creating an unreasonable delay that harmed the alleged infringer, you may lose the right to collect damages for infringements that occurred before the suit was filed.
music drm -> copyright licenses -> pricing for replacement copies -> pricing for visual c++
I just saw C++ .NET at Best Buy for like $79
The $79 per seat price applies only to the toy compiler that might as well be an interpreter, not to the C++ optimizing compiler. The optimizing compiler is available only as part of Visual Studio .NET ($1,079).
It will NEVER have hardware support
The freeing of Tremor should change that.
cause it has a stupid name
Is "em-pee-three" any better?
Not to mention have you EVER seen an OGG on KaZaA Lite, WinMX or eDonkey?
I have seen .ogg files on WinMX. The main reason you don't is that WinMX by default shares only files named "*.mp3".
By the time anyone ever takes OGG seriously, the patent for MP3 will have expired
Not if Unisys, Thomson, Lilly, and Pfizer get together and lobby for a Cherilyn Lapierre Patent Term Extension Act.
I was able to download and use an ogg encoder on my home pc, but can't find on one their site today. Can someone provide a valid url?
I use OggDropXPd.
Try looking at the 68K instruction set, or the Z8000 (or Z80000) instruction set. Nice orthogonal instruction sets, no special purpose registers (except for the stack pointer - A7 and R15/RR14 respectively).
Even better, look at the ARM instruction set. Every instruction can be conditionally executed based on the same flags that other archs (6502, 68000, ppc, x86, etc) use for branches. Heck, even the program counter is a general purpose register. If you want to learn on a simple ARM machine, start here.
I've heard/seen of macroing in MMORPG's for years now.
In this system, the AI learns your playing style and writes the macros itself.
I'd like to publish source eventually but I'm wary of having it stolen and then getting sued by someone else claiming it's "theirs"
Don't worry. Here's all you have to do to prove that you possessed a file:
of course they could. perhaps the re-license fee could be a percentage of actual revenue, but that would be extremely shady as well.
Not shady at all. Consider it a tax on net profits derived from a government-granted monopoly.
Ever read the short story Melancholy Elephants [baen.com]?
I have. It's especially terrifying when taken along with the fact that a fellow can get sued for copying a four note melody from an existing song, and that there exist fewer than 50,000 such melodies.
when someone else in the future figures out how to make a bona-fide cloaking device (complete with that awesome Romulan warbird cloaking sound), he'll charge them a licensing fee for their design because he already patented the basic idea.
In that case, it's called gambling. Patents last 20 years after filing in most jurisdictions because the late Sonny "Treehugger" Bono never managed to touch patents. Thus, Ray Alden is making a bet that a cloaking device will be developed within the next twenty years.
what if it's only, say, 10% functional? Not at all useful
Except for a well-done camouflage suit, where a little goes a long way.
Atari gave us some much of joy! Too bad it's dead now
If Atari is so dead, then who published Neverwinter Nights? At least one of the two Atari companies is alive and kicking as part of Infogrames. (The other got bought by a hard drive maker.)
Remember the IIS fuck China worm?
No I don't. I remember the Sadmind worm that spread among Solaris machines and defaced IIS machines with "fuck USA Government fuck PoizonBOx" and a .com.cn e-mail address, and I remember some other worm (Code Red?) that jokes "Welcome to www.worm.com! Hacked by Chinese!" on pages it defaces hosted on servers running USA Windows.
Oh wait, after a quick search of the web, I find that somebody patched Code Red to use a slight variation of the Sadmind worm's payload: "fuck CHINA Government fuck PoizonBOx".
Carbon is not part of Marklar.
No, but there's no reason for that to be true. Carbon is almost precisely the subset of Mac Toolbox that was included in QuickTime for Windows. Yes, Apple wrote a Mac source compatibility layer to port its media layer.
When I go the other way around (because of my assumption that I'm too lazy to intelligently combine opcodes)
Transmeta's Crusoe processor, which uses a Code Morphing emulation front-end to run x86 software, does intelligently combine opcodes. So does HP's similar Dynamo technology.
I'm kinda despairing tho; the paper is several years old, and any 27 obvious applications have failed to use it.
It takes twenty years for some technologies to take off.
Coincidentally, that's the term of a United States patent.
"More per clock" only matters when you are worried about energy use and heat generation (embedded market)
or (fanless workstations)
or (energy star guidelines to meet certain government customers' bids)
or (intel P4 is a big fat clock divider in front of an overclocked 486)
I can buy a P4 machine that will solve my problems faster than an Athlon.
Including the time it takes you to wait tables to earn money to pay for the electricity a P4 eats?
Whenever an underpowered but inexpensive computing device is released, many Anonymous Cowards suggest that a fellow could turn a cluster of such devices into a supercomputer. Most of the time, such posters refer to the Beowulf clustering project. Exhibit A, the most common form of the joke:
The joke has been old for several years.
So brondsem asked: "would a beowulf cluster [of self-organizing circuits] create the Internet?" I'm still not sure what (s)he meant by that, as Al Gore created the commercialized Internet.
mod: -1, Offtopic. metamod: -1, Redundant.
Did they make the trailers blank at the start to get people to upgrade their Quick time?
Not necessarily. Perhaps the older Sorenson Video codec included with QuickTime 3 and 4 would introduce horrible artifacts that would shine a negative light on the cinematic quality of the first 20 seconds of the trailer.