Why use percentages in an intentionally confusing and inconsistent way like that?
I don't know, but people do it. When they say things like "n times more than", a slight variation in words might mean either (y = x * n) or (y = x + x * n). I'm not nitpicking, it can be very confusing.
OTOH, when they say "n times less than" it always means (y = x / n), it's only the Slashdot anal-retentive trolls who find any problems about it.
a computer has to consider many orders of magnitude more board combinations than a human does (or even possibly could), simply to challenge even very elementary players, and that even grandmasters only typically considered a few dozen plays at most before making a move
I think humans consider many more combinations than they are aware of, because they do it in parallel. The human eye is excellent at recognizing patterns, this processing starts in the retina, before reaching the brain itself.
When a human player sees a chess position, let's say a knight and three pawns, he might recognize from their positions that two of the pawns are doomed so he falls back to a standard knight and one pawn, which is a well studied situation that can be played from memorized textbook positions.
The computer, OTOH, has to evaluate all the intermediate positions that will inevitably lead to the loss of two pawns before reaching the textbook positions. The reason why the human player didn't evaluate all those positions was because he "pruned" those plays from the tree of alternatives he had to evaluate.
In the end, the number of viable alternatives they consider are approximately the same, only the computer is faster at evaluating the alternatives by checking them move by move, while the human is faster at identifying patterns in the position.
Usually when they release a film in DVD they include material that was not present in the original. "Pretty Baby" is the opposite, the DVD shows less than was in the VHS or theatre versions.
The translation from "two times less massive" to "less massive by a factor of two" is pretty straightforward and easily understood...
The real problem happens in the opposite direction. A star that's 200% as massive as the sun is smaller than one that's 150% more massive than the sun, but many people will give the wrong answer if asked.
How can something be X-times less massive than something else? I can understand half as massive, or 1/10 as massive, but two to ten times less massive doesn't make any mathematical sense for a result that must be a positive number.
Don't worry, it's only you. Everybody else understood perfectly that they are now estimated to be between 10% and 50% of the former estimate. Or can you imagine any other reasonable interpretation for that?
OK, it's a PDF, but it would be nice if everybody (including those who modded it "informative") tried to RTFToS (http://create.msdn.com/downloads/?id=638 see item "L")
Let's quote from your own link. First of all, the line you put between quotes was entirely out of context, because you omitted the initial "while" and the following lines:
"they also refused to explain what the problem really was. Sources at the LSE tell me to this day that the problem was with TradElect.
Since then, the CEO that brought TradElect to the LSE, Clara Furse, has left without saying why she was leaving. Sources in the City-London's equivalent of New York City's Wall Street--tell me that TradElect's failure was the final straw for her tenure. The new CEO, Xavier Rolet, is reported to have immediately decided to put an end to TradElect."
You also failed to mention that the article's title was "London Stock Exchange to abandon failed Windows platform" and that the author concluded:
"So, might I suggest to the LSE that they consider Linux as the foundation for their next stock software infrastructure? After all, besides working well for Chi-X, Linux seems to be doing quite nicely for the CME (Chicago Mercantile Exchange), the NYSE (New York Stock Exchange), etc., etc."
That being said, Linux is just a better platform to build something like this on. Sure, you can do it with Windows and make it work, but it's just more and unnecessarily difficult.
I keep hearing this, but never see any technical details. Why is this so?
I had extensive Windows programming experience before I switched to Linux about ten years ago and, basically, it boils down to the Unix philosophy.
Linux is a system made by programmers for programmers. Windows is a system made following directions of the marketing department.
Of course, I don't think that Deep Blue really out-played Kasparov on a level playing field either... I would be far more impressed if they could design a chess-playing computer that only considers a few hundred board combinations and still plays at a grandmaster level, since that is all that even the best human grandmasters do.
How do you know what grandmasters do?
When I was about 12 years old I had a neighbor who played chess and he always beat me. What surprised me was that, for every play I came up with, he always had a winning counter play. That guy, who was certainly not a chess master, knew thousands of different plays.
It's interesting that it was exactly that which turned me off chess. I realized that playing chess wasn't a matter of reasoning and logic as I had thought. Learning to play chess well is hard work, thousands of games to study, thousands of alternative plays to memorize.
Previously there was a lot of chatter about the platforms (.NET, MSSQL 2003, etc...)
It's one thing to have a 42 seconds glitch in the first day a totally new system is powered up. That's perfectly normal, and had been predicted:
"Observers watching today's Linux-based launch will likely note that such a large change could bring about some teething problems, as with any technology overhaul."
It's a totally different thing to have it stop for a whole day after having been in operation for three months.
So, in conclusion, yes, it's about the platform..NET, MSSQL 2003, etc aren't robust enough for this kind of job.
Personally I suspect that if a number of "Anonymous" "Ringleaders" got caught by the FBI and sentenced to pretty hefty sentences the overall membership of their activities will probably sharply decline.
Most of them are in it for the lulz after all and lulz are not worth several years in prison or higher fines then you can pay off in your lifetime.
Yes, because the "war on drugs" worked so well its tactics must be adopted everywhere, right?
Protesting is one thing but wanton destruction of property is another
Do you want to see how much property was "destroyed"? Look here
That's it, what they call "vandalism" was a piece of paper with something written. If someone could prove they are "Anonymous" they would have grounds to sue HBGary for libel.
The Haaretz â" Israel's oldest daily newspaper â" reports
However the Bible, the world's first and oldest printed book, fails to mention any aspect of this story, including the General's involvement.
I didn't know they had translated the bible to Chinese thousand years ago...
I didn't know the Chinese had invented movable type thousand years ago.
The devil is in the details. The Chinese and Koreans had a process of printing that used movable type as part of the process, but the task of making the plates needed for each page was so laborious that few books were printed that way.
From wikipedia: During the reign of Chingli, [1041â"1048] Bi Sheng, a man of unofficial position, made movable type. His method was as follows: he took sticky clay and cut in it characters as thin as the edge of a coin. Each character formed, as it were, a single type. He baked them in the fire to make them hard. He had previously prepared an iron plate and he had covered his plate with a mixture of pine resin, wax, and paper ashes. When he wished to print, he took an iron frame and set it on the iron plate. In this he placed the types, set close together. When the frame was full, the whole made one solid block of type. He then placed it near the fire to warm it. When the paste [at the back] was slightly melted, he took a smooth board and pressed it over the surface, so that the block of type became as even as a whetstone."
Gutenberg's process was much simpler and faster, it became a practical solution, instead of a curiosity, that's why he's regarded as the inventor of "printing".
There is at least one eminent scholar that believes Jesus was an illiterate peasant. He used to be a catholic priest, did extensive research on the subject, and wrote nearly thirty books about it.
What amazes me is that people feel they are somewhat superior to others because they believe in Bronze Age legends and take part in symbolic cannibalism rituals.
And so ends one more of an increasingly long line of Accenture / MSFT snafus.
At $40 million / snafu they couldn't care less. Now let's see the people at LSE who proposed the Accenture / MSFT solution. Will they be fired? Will the $40 million be discounted from their bonuses? I doubt it. Because they are probably working at another victim by now. Where will the next snafu be? Stay tuned.
Slashdot Mirror
I want a device that I can point to a screen and make the slides disappear
Why use percentages in an intentionally confusing and inconsistent way like that?
I don't know, but people do it. When they say things like "n times more than", a slight variation in words might mean either (y = x * n) or (y = x + x * n). I'm not nitpicking, it can be very confusing.
OTOH, when they say "n times less than" it always means (y = x / n), it's only the Slashdot anal-retentive trolls who find any problems about it.
a computer has to consider many orders of magnitude more board combinations than a human does (or even possibly could), simply to challenge even very elementary players, and that even grandmasters only typically considered a few dozen plays at most before making a move
I think humans consider many more combinations than they are aware of, because they do it in parallel. The human eye is excellent at recognizing patterns, this processing starts in the retina, before reaching the brain itself.
When a human player sees a chess position, let's say a knight and three pawns, he might recognize from their positions that two of the pawns are doomed so he falls back to a standard knight and one pawn, which is a well studied situation that can be played from memorized textbook positions.
The computer, OTOH, has to evaluate all the intermediate positions that will inevitably lead to the loss of two pawns before reaching the textbook positions. The reason why the human player didn't evaluate all those positions was because he "pruned" those plays from the tree of alternatives he had to evaluate.
In the end, the number of viable alternatives they consider are approximately the same, only the computer is faster at evaluating the alternatives by checking them move by move, while the human is faster at identifying patterns in the position.
Usually when they release a film in DVD they include material that was not present in the original. "Pretty Baby" is the opposite, the DVD shows less than was in the VHS or theatre versions.
The translation from "two times less massive" to "less massive by a factor of two" is pretty straightforward and easily understood...
The real problem happens in the opposite direction. A star that's 200% as massive as the sun is smaller than one that's 150% more massive than the sun, but many people will give the wrong answer if asked.
How can something be X-times less massive than something else? I can understand half as massive, or 1/10 as massive, but two to ten times less massive doesn't make any mathematical sense for a result that must be a positive number.
Don't worry, it's only you. Everybody else understood perfectly that they are now estimated to be between 10% and 50% of the former estimate. Or can you imagine any other reasonable interpretation for that?
but they are still super massive right? If not that totally ruins most of my celestial bodies jokes.
Not all of them, only the "yo momma so fat" jokes. The Uranus jokes are still in effect.
OK, it's a PDF, but it would be nice if everybody (including those who modded it "informative") tried to RTFToS (http://create.msdn.com/downloads/?id=638 see item "L")
That's NOT what London Stock Exchange reps said:
"LSE denied that the collapse was TradElect's fault" - http://blogs.computerworld.com/london_stock_exchange_to_abandon_failed_windows_platform by Stephen J. Vaughn-Nichols
Let's quote from your own link. First of all, the line you put between quotes was entirely out of context, because you omitted the initial "while" and the following lines:
"they also refused to explain what the problem really was. Sources at the LSE tell me to this day that the problem was with TradElect.
Since then, the CEO that brought TradElect to the LSE, Clara Furse, has left without saying why she was leaving. Sources in the City-London's equivalent of New York City's Wall Street--tell me that TradElect's failure was the final straw for her tenure. The new CEO, Xavier Rolet, is reported to have immediately decided to put an end to TradElect."
You also failed to mention that the article's title was "London Stock Exchange to abandon failed Windows platform" and that the author concluded:
"So, might I suggest to the LSE that they consider Linux as the foundation for their next stock software infrastructure? After all, besides working well for Chi-X, Linux seems to be doing quite nicely for the CME (Chicago Mercantile Exchange), the NYSE (New York Stock Exchange), etc., etc."
That being said, Linux is just a better platform to build something like this on. Sure, you can do it with Windows and make it work, but it's just more and unnecessarily difficult.
I keep hearing this, but never see any technical details. Why is this so?
I had extensive Windows programming experience before I switched to Linux about ten years ago and, basically, it boils down to the Unix philosophy.
Linux is a system made by programmers for programmers. Windows is a system made following directions of the marketing department.
Of course, I don't think that Deep Blue really out-played Kasparov on a level playing field either... I would be far more impressed if they could design a chess-playing computer that only considers a few hundred board combinations and still plays at a grandmaster level, since that is all that even the best human grandmasters do.
How do you know what grandmasters do?
When I was about 12 years old I had a neighbor who played chess and he always beat me. What surprised me was that, for every play I came up with, he always had a winning counter play. That guy, who was certainly not a chess master, knew thousands of different plays.
It's interesting that it was exactly that which turned me off chess. I realized that playing chess wasn't a matter of reasoning and logic as I had thought. Learning to play chess well is hard work, thousands of games to study, thousands of alternative plays to memorize.
Playing chess is too machine-like to my taste.
Previously there was a lot of chatter about the platforms (.NET, MSSQL 2003, etc...)
It's one thing to have a 42 seconds glitch in the first day a totally new system is powered up. That's perfectly normal, and had been predicted:
"Observers watching today's Linux-based launch will likely note that such a large change could bring about some teething problems, as with any technology overhaul."
It's a totally different thing to have it stop for a whole day after having been in operation for three months.
So, in conclusion, yes, it's about the platform. .NET, MSSQL 2003, etc aren't robust enough for this kind of job.
His DNA sequence will also be fairly close to any ethnic group to which he belongs.
Thanks to DNA sequencing, it is known that Jewish women of Central and Eastern European origin have a higher than normal risk of getting breast cancer.
Should every one's right to information be limited by whatever group feels their "privacy" rights are more important?
Where do we file bug reports?
You don't. Leave that to his mother in law.
Old joke:
"What kind of job do you do?" a lady passenger asked the man seated next to her on the airplane.
"I'm a naval surgeon," he replied.
"Goodness!" said the lady, "How you doctors specialize these days!"
Wait...Q....the Quakenet bot?
No, this Q
Personally I suspect that if a number of "Anonymous" "Ringleaders" got caught by the FBI and sentenced to pretty hefty sentences the overall membership of their activities will probably sharply decline.
Most of them are in it for the lulz after all and lulz are not worth several years in prison or higher fines then you can pay off in your lifetime.
Yes, because the "war on drugs" worked so well its tactics must be adopted everywhere, right?
That article gave me an idea for a new wikipedia warning: "this article contains too many buzzwords".
Less than 10 minutes later, Adams posted a second Facebook message that said he âoeneeded this girl knocked off right nowâ Billie testified.
Probably just a typo, he meant he "needed this girl knocked up", that's why he tried to rape her.
Protesting is one thing but wanton destruction of property is another
Do you want to see how much property was "destroyed"? Look here
That's it, what they call "vandalism" was a piece of paper with something written. If someone could prove they are "Anonymous" they would have grounds to sue HBGary for libel.
The Haaretz â" Israel's oldest daily newspaper â" reports
However the Bible, the world's first and oldest printed book, fails to mention any aspect of this story, including the General's involvement.
I didn't know they had translated the bible to Chinese thousand years ago...
I didn't know the Chinese had invented movable type thousand years ago.
The devil is in the details. The Chinese and Koreans had a process of printing that used movable type as part of the process, but the task of making the plates needed for each page was so laborious that few books were printed that way.
From wikipedia: During the reign of Chingli, [1041â"1048] Bi Sheng, a man of unofficial position, made movable type. His method was as follows: he took sticky clay and cut in it characters as thin as the edge of a coin. Each character formed, as it were, a single type. He baked them in the fire to make them hard. He had previously prepared an iron plate and he had covered his plate with a mixture of pine resin, wax, and paper ashes. When he wished to print, he took an iron frame and set it on the iron plate. In this he placed the types, set close together. When the frame was full, the whole made one solid block of type. He then placed it near the fire to warm it. When the paste [at the back] was slightly melted, he took a smooth board and pressed it over the surface, so that the block of type became as even as a whetstone."
Gutenberg's process was much simpler and faster, it became a practical solution, instead of a curiosity, that's why he's regarded as the inventor of "printing".
There is at least one eminent scholar that believes Jesus was an illiterate peasant. He used to be a catholic priest, did extensive research on the subject, and wrote nearly thirty books about it.
What amazes me is that people feel they are somewhat superior to others because they believe in Bronze Age legends and take part in symbolic cannibalism rituals.
Let's see: Glenn Beck.
Hmmm, yes he has reasons to be afraid of Google. However that's just because he refuses to deny it. Why? Why doesn't he come forth and deny it?
And so ends one more of an increasingly long line of Accenture / MSFT snafus.
At $40 million / snafu they couldn't care less. Now let's see the people at LSE who proposed the Accenture / MSFT solution. Will they be fired? Will the $40 million be discounted from their bonuses? I doubt it. Because they are probably working at another victim by now. Where will the next snafu be? Stay tuned.