...that 10 years from now some kid with the latest Nintendo game will be able to say "a computer like this used to take up as much space as two basketball courts".
aka TANSTAAFL, which sounds like a city near Istanbul, but isn't.
Re:I got .06 and I know the secret...
on
Quickie Twister
·
· Score: 2
I hacked in an "average" output, and sent it to the author. If his mailbox doesn't get slashdotted, maybe he'll put out a 1.01 version.
Having the average there doesn't totally resolve the issue of cheating, but it makes it a bit more fair to compare results. So far, my average is about 0.34 out of 6 or 7 tries. Hmmm... I guess if he wanted to, he could make it add a 1 second penalty every time you cheated.
Re:I Got 0.11 But I Cheated.
on
Quickie Twister
·
· Score: 2
For real, or did you pull out MSPaint and do a little font fiddling?
Nothing Flat (was Re:I Got 0.11 But I Cheated.)
on
Quickie Twister
·
· Score: 2
OK, that played through way too quickly. I got nothing flat: http://www.vrml3d.com/temp/time0.gif
In a reflex test like this, where the consequences of failure are zero, there is nothing to discouraging people from gambling using my statistical cheat.
Now, if this were NHRA drag racing, I would be disqualified on almost every race, so my cheat wouldn't work. If you really want to measure someone's reflexes, you need to take a lot of samples and run some statistics. There must be a fairly good body of research on this, and I bet the math to account for guess-based cheating is non-trivial. Anybody out there experienced in the field of reaction time measurements?
Re:I Got 0.11 But I Cheated.
on
Quickie Twister
·
· Score: 2
I meant I would be surprised if we didn't see 0.01 within the hour, assuming the resolution of their timer is sufficient.
If you don't believe me just visit here: http://www.vrml3d.com/temp/TIME.gif
The secret? Don't actually try to react. Just try to judge a typical time for the delay, and play the odds. Sooner or later you'll hit really close. I would be surprised if we didn't see a 0.1 within the hour.
...books on structured design and his duology (is that a two book series?) Decline and Fall of the American Programmer and The Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer.
Stay tuned for The Fluctuation of The American Programmer to round out the trilogy.
And of course, don't forget the fourth book in the trilogy: So Long and Thanks for all the Mountain Dew.
Voting Is A Waste Of Time unless you're voting in a Slashdot pole?
OK, OK, they were asking about "real" elections, but somehow the fact that so many people voted that voting is a waste of time amuses me.
I think one of the choices should have been "Slashdot poles are a waste of time". Of course, if 7% of the people want to confess that they like wasting their time I guess there is nothing wrong with that. Better yet, many of the things commonly referred to as a waste of time, such as trying to convince people you are right and they are wrong, may in fact not be such a waste of time after all despite the fact that they have acquired such a label.
Ugg... I feel a recursive existential angst coming on. I think I'll quite now.
For various reasons that have come to my attention, I believe we may need to add more USENET servers. Based on our market share and other data, I believe we can anticipate a dramatic increase in USENET traffic, especially in the binary groups. Some of the other managers and I had a meeting this afternoon and discussed the possibility of blocking the binary groups, but decided that in order to provide our customers the level of service to which they are accustomed, that should not be done. So, add some more USENET servers. If you have any questions, you know where to reach me.
For those who don't know: Slashdot was bought by Andover (ANDN) which was then bought by VA Linux (LNUX). Don't go looking for ANDN, it's now LNUX. Unless LNUX decides to spin off the websites and concentrate on rack servers, there will never be a/. IPO.
Better yet, the wireless cuecat could have a little screen, so you didn't have to go to the computer. Wow! waddya know. We've just invented Handsprings and Pilots. Let's patent something and sue both of them.
Actually, a scanner module for the Handspring would be useful, if there isn't one already. A hearty handshake to the first hacker who grafts a Cue Cat onto a handspring.
This is just ongoing fallout from the "good old days" when VCs would throw money at any idea with Internet in it. Just the other day, I got a T-shirt from Swapit.com, even though I have never used their service and have no intention of ever doing so.
A lot of silly stuff is still in the pipeline. Even though VC money isn't flowing as freely as it was, it will take a while for these things to stop because companies have already signed contracts and ordered things.
Maybe Netscape is stupid enough to load the JVM whenever JavaScript is run, but IE doesn't do that. As the other posters pointed out, Java!=JavaScript, but I do seem to recall that some earlier versions of Netscape loaded the JVM whenever any kind of scripting was involved...
At any rate, I'm pretty sure you can grab the URL from within Perl, since it's one of the CGI environment variables. Then, based on that, he could put a big red warning up on the page, along with a link to the real Slashdot.
I wonder what kind of traffic these sites actually get
http://www.googol.com/ has over 300,000 hits this year. I don't think it would be doing that well without Google, but this guy has a legitimate claim. After all, his site *does* have material about the googol, as well as the googolhedron, which I never thought of before.
And it got modded up! I guess this is living proof: Be true to your ideals, never sell out, always stand up for what you believe in, and you will eventually find favor.
Troll on, oh pirst foster. Though your karma will disappear into the Slashdot bit bucket, it will live on in the hearts and minds of those who love you, whoever you may be.
Of course the human eye has limits, but that's not what 200+ FPS is for. The more frames, the faster you can do fake radiosity, environment mapping, and other effects that involve multiple frames composited to form the final image.
I would like to see 307200 FPS so we can run a separate pipeline for each pixel on a 640*480 screen. Oh... and I'd like the card that does that to be so cheap that when it burns out you just run down to the drugstore and get one for $1.98. It'll happen eventually.
Eenie meenie miney moe
Stupid voters have to go.
Inca dinca dinca do
I can do it, why can't you?
OK, I was too busy looking for opportunities to be funny to realize that right-handers are naturally going to put this thing in their left hand. So sue me.
Eenie meenie miney moe
Stupid voters have to go.
Inca dinca dinca do
I can do it, why can't you?
Why did they do this only left handed? I mean, the original designer was probably a lefty, but certainly he realised that most... oh, wait. They're in Australia where everything is upside down, so lefties must be the majority.
Eenie meenie miney moe
Stupid voters have to go.
Inca dinca dinca do
I can do it, why can't you?
I don't buy that whole "contamination" thing. If contamination exists then: Anybody who's ever used MFC is contaminated, because it comes with proprietary MS source code. Conversly, anybody who's ever patched gcc is a GPL violator unless they release all their work under the GPL.
Unless Open Source projects start showing up with large swaths of code containing things like DWORD and LPVOID, I don't see how MS could prove anything.
Oh no! I've just released the secret of DWORD and LPVOID! I'm doomed!!!
You can probably search the registry for aol.com and change it that way. I'd verify it, but in order to do that, I'd actually have to install AOL.
Hmmm... if that turns out to be the case, then maybe I can do a little business selling AOL homepage unlockers.
There is nothing that says a user can't edit the registry. OTOH, if they embedded it in the EXE, then you'd have to hexedit the program. It would be a real pain if they embedded it *and* obfuscated it.
What happens if you set AOL as the default browser, and create an Internet shortcut on the desktop? That might be a real easy fix.
Slashdot Mirror
...that 10 years from now some kid with the latest Nintendo game will be able to say "a computer like this used to take up as much space as two basketball courts".
aka TANSTAAFL, which sounds like a city near Istanbul, but isn't.
I hacked in an "average" output, and sent it to the author. If his mailbox doesn't get slashdotted, maybe he'll put out a 1.01 version.
Having the average there doesn't totally resolve the issue of cheating, but it makes it a bit more fair to compare results. So far, my average is about 0.34 out of 6 or 7 tries. Hmmm... I guess if he wanted to, he could make it add a 1 second penalty every time you cheated.
For real, or did you pull out MSPaint and do a little font fiddling?
OK, that played through way too quickly. I got nothing flat: http://www.vrml3d.com/temp/time0.gif
In a reflex test like this, where the consequences of failure are zero, there is nothing to discouraging people from gambling using my statistical cheat.
Now, if this were NHRA drag racing, I would be disqualified on almost every race, so my cheat wouldn't work. If you really want to measure someone's reflexes, you need to take a lot of samples and run some statistics. There must be a fairly good body of research on this, and I bet the math to account for guess-based cheating is non-trivial. Anybody out there experienced in the field of reaction time measurements?
I meant I would be surprised if we didn't see 0.01 within the hour, assuming the resolution of their timer is sufficient.
If you don't believe me just visit here: http://www.vrml3d.com/temp/TIME.gif
The secret? Don't actually try to react. Just try to judge a typical time for the delay, and play the odds. Sooner or later you'll hit really close. I would be surprised if we didn't see a 0.1 within the hour.
Stay tuned for The Fluctuation of The American Programmer to round out the trilogy.
And of course, don't forget the fourth book in the trilogy: So Long and Thanks for all the Mountain Dew.
R2, are you sure this thing is safe?
Voting Is A Waste Of Time unless you're voting in a Slashdot pole?
OK, OK, they were asking about "real" elections, but somehow the fact that so many people voted that voting is a waste of time amuses me.
I think one of the choices should have been "Slashdot poles are a waste of time". Of course, if 7% of the people want to confess that they like wasting their time I guess there is nothing wrong with that. Better yet, many of the things commonly referred to as a waste of time, such as trying to convince people you are right and they are wrong, may in fact not be such a waste of time after all despite the fact that they have acquired such a label.
Ugg... I feel a recursive existential angst coming on. I think I'll quite now.
To: Director of IT operations.
For various reasons that have come to my attention, I believe we may need to add more USENET servers. Based on our market share and other data, I believe we can anticipate a dramatic increase in USENET traffic, especially in the binary groups. Some of the other managers and I had a meeting this afternoon and discussed the possibility of blocking the binary groups, but decided that in order to provide our customers the level of service to which they are accustomed, that should not be done. So, add some more USENET servers. If you have any questions, you know where to reach me.
Not gonna do it. My dad says it wouldn't be prudent. Bad questions! Bad!
For those who don't know: Slashdot was bought by Andover (ANDN) which was then bought by VA Linux (LNUX). Don't go looking for ANDN, it's now LNUX. Unless LNUX decides to spin off the websites and concentrate on rack servers, there will never be a /. IPO.
It's Bill The Cat's skull, can't you tell?
Better yet, the wireless cuecat could have a little screen, so you didn't have to go to the computer. Wow! waddya know. We've just invented Handsprings and Pilots. Let's patent something and sue both of them.
Actually, a scanner module for the Handspring would be useful, if there isn't one already. A hearty handshake to the first hacker who grafts a Cue Cat onto a handspring.
This is just ongoing fallout from the "good old days" when VCs would throw money at any idea with Internet in it. Just the other day, I got a T-shirt from Swapit.com, even though I have never used their service and have no intention of ever doing so.
A lot of silly stuff is still in the pipeline. Even though VC money isn't flowing as freely as it was, it will take a while for these things to stop because companies have already signed contracts and ordered things.
Maybe Netscape is stupid enough to load the JVM whenever JavaScript is run, but IE doesn't do that. As the other posters pointed out, Java!=JavaScript, but I do seem to recall that some earlier versions of Netscape loaded the JVM whenever any kind of scripting was involved...
At any rate, I'm pretty sure you can grab the URL from within Perl, since it's one of the CGI environment variables. Then, based on that, he could put a big red warning up on the page, along with a link to the real Slashdot.
I wonder what kind of traffic these sites actually get
http://www.googol.com/ has over 300,000 hits this year. I don't think it would be doing that well without Google, but this guy has a legitimate claim. After all, his site *does* have material about the googol, as well as the googolhedron, which I never thought of before.
And it got modded up! I guess this is living proof: Be true to your ideals, never sell out, always stand up for what you believe in, and you will eventually find favor.
Troll on, oh pirst foster. Though your karma will disappear into the Slashdot bit bucket, it will live on in the hearts and minds of those who love you, whoever you may be.
Of course the human eye has limits, but that's not what 200+ FPS is for. The more frames, the faster you can do fake radiosity, environment mapping, and other effects that involve multiple frames composited to form the final image.
I would like to see 307200 FPS so we can run a separate pipeline for each pixel on a 640*480 screen. Oh... and I'd like the card that does that to be so cheap that when it burns out you just run down to the drugstore and get one for $1.98. It'll happen eventually.
Eenie meenie miney moe
Stupid voters have to go.
Inca dinca dinca do
I can do it, why can't you?
OK, I was too busy looking for opportunities to be funny to realize that right-handers are naturally going to put this thing in their left hand. So sue me.
Eenie meenie miney moe
Stupid voters have to go.
Inca dinca dinca do
I can do it, why can't you?
Why did they do this only left handed? I mean, the original designer was probably a lefty, but certainly he realised that most... oh, wait. They're in Australia where everything is upside down, so lefties must be the majority.
Eenie meenie miney moe
Stupid voters have to go.
Inca dinca dinca do
I can do it, why can't you?
The PS2 short is badly aliased. Wasn't that a problem with some early Japanese PS2s that has since been fixed?
Eenie meenie miney moe
Stupid voters have to go.
Inca dinca dinca do
I can do it, why can't you?
I don't buy that whole "contamination" thing. If contamination exists then: Anybody who's ever used MFC is contaminated, because it comes with proprietary MS source code. Conversly, anybody who's ever patched gcc is a GPL violator unless they release all their work under the GPL.
Unless Open Source projects start showing up with large swaths of code containing things like DWORD and LPVOID, I don't see how MS could prove anything.
Oh no! I've just released the secret of DWORD and LPVOID! I'm doomed!!!
You can probably search the registry for aol.com and change it that way. I'd verify it, but in order to do that, I'd actually have to install AOL.
Hmmm... if that turns out to be the case, then maybe I can do a little business selling AOL homepage unlockers.
There is nothing that says a user can't edit the registry. OTOH, if they embedded it in the EXE, then you'd have to hexedit the program. It would be a real pain if they embedded it *and* obfuscated it.
What happens if you set AOL as the default browser, and create an Internet shortcut on the desktop? That might be a real easy fix.