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User: Matrix14

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Comments · 93

  1. Re:Not a replacement yet on Big Advance In Hydrogen Production Could Change Alternative Energy Landscape · · Score: 1

    Not really. Better battery technologies could increase the prevalence of electric cars, and the conversion of hydrogen to electricity can happen offline (i.e., at a power plant).

  2. Monads! on The Scourge of Error Handling · · Score: 2

    Monads monads monads monads monads from Haskell.

    Or "workflows" in F#. Related to, I think, "generators" in Scala?

    Roughly (and I'm going to make up some C++/Java style syntax here), you write something like this:

    workflow someExpressionMaybeAnObject
    {
            int x = someassignment;
            some statement;
            someotherstatement;
    }

    At the end of each line, you check the return value for errors, and use the handlers defined by the object up top, which could short-circuit the rest of evaluation.

    These are actually a lot more general than error handling. For example, they generalize Python-style list comprehensions when used in a certain way.

    In Haskell-land, there's a lot of interesting math about how they work, but you don't need it for error handling.

    Moral: Learn a wider variety of languages!

  3. Re:Imagine that... on US Has Secret Tools To Force Internet On Dictatorships · · Score: 1

    English isn't particularly more fault-tolerant than other languages. All languages are fault tolerant. It's why things like noun-verb agreement exist: they provide redundancy and error detection and correction.

    English is so dominant on the Internet because England conquered the world and the US is enormously influential.

  4. Re:I'll be first to say WTF on Polynomial Time Code For 3-SAT Released, P==NP · · Score: 1

    Yes it does. The two formulations are equivalent, and, in fact the time-to-check answer one is much more commonly used because it is much easier to reason about.

  5. Re:Obligatory... on DoE Develops Flexible Glass Stronger Than Steel · · Score: 1

    Mithril totally is aluminum., Light, strong, shiny and more valuable than gold until the modern age.

  6. Re:Forget the article, submitter is weird on A New Idea, For People Who Want To See More Banner Ads · · Score: 1

    This is less true of web ads, but a lot of print ads and billboards are very well designed and definitely enrich the visual environment.

  7. Re:Regardless on What To Load On a 4-Year-Old's Netbook? · · Score: 2, Informative

    When I was 10, I was making elaborate 3D models in a modeler called Form-Z, and, while I like to think I'm pretty smart, I don't think that it was that hard. Kids from like 8 to 12 have an incredible ability to hyperconcentrate on cool things like that.

    When I was five, I was using a mouse to make drawings in KidPix. I don't think it is that unreasonable to expect a four year old to have a lot of fun with blender. And you are vastly underestimating them if you think they can't use a mouse.

  8. Re:Hyperlinks and Pagerank 101 on No Press Is Bad Press Even Online · · Score: 1

    It's only *finitely* improbable...

  9. Re:This is how train and air travel began, too. on SpaceShipTwo Flies Free For the First Time · · Score: 1

    I imagine there is a pretty good market for New York to Europe or Japan in half an hour for 100K. High level executives in multinational corporations with emergencies to fix would probably be willing to pay for this all the time.

  10. Re:Only 20 light years??? on Earth-Like Planet That Could Sustain Life Found · · Score: 1

    Re: temperature, Wired article says "minus 24 degrees to 10 degrees above zero Fahrenheit" would be expected, except that it is almost certainly tidally locked, so one side is boiling with the other freezing. There would be a temperate zone in the middle.

    http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/09/real-habitable-exoplanet/

  11. Re:Only 20 light years??? on Earth-Like Planet That Could Sustain Life Found · · Score: 1

    Apparently this one was easier to find because the star was a red dwarf. This means that, because it is not as bright as the Sun, the habitable zone is much closer in and so the gravitational force between the star and the planet was larger. Moreover, the red dwarf is much less massive than the Sun. Together these two facts mean that the star wiggles a lot more do to gravitational effects than an Earthlike planet would cause a Sunlike star to, and so it was easier to find. Aliens on this planet trying to find planets around the Sun with the same techniques would be able find only Saturn and Jupiter.

    So says my science writer friend.

  12. Re:Perverting the course of justice. on Man Gets 12-Year Jail Sentence For Planting Child Porn On Enemy's Computer · · Score: 1

    This is indeed Twelve Angry Men.

  13. Re:Six films? on Lucas Promises Star Wars on Blu-Ray in 2011 · · Score: 1

    Eh, idunno. I think Revenge of the Sith is at least as good as Return of the Jedi. Purists may burn me alive, I guess.

  14. Paper on Claimed Proof That P != NP · · Score: 1

    I didn't see this elsewhere in the comments.

    Here is a link to the paper off of Dr. Deolalikar's official website at HP. It appears to be rather slow, but is loading eventually.

  15. Re:It is killing retail too on $200B Lost To Counterfeiting? Back It Up · · Score: 1

    I'm a guy, sitting in an office in front of a computer in the middle of the night, in a tiedye tee-shirt and blue jeans I bought at goddamn Target, and even I know that clothing quality can scale linearly with price easily up to $400 for a dress.

  16. Re:Ideally the best metric would be on 4 Cores? 6 Cores? Do You Care? · · Score: 1

    The problem with that is that operations per second on a multicore machine does not mean the same thing as on a single core machine. If I increase the number of cores, the number of operations per second goes up, but your programs won't run any faster unless the programmer wrote really good threaded code. Which he or she didn't, because that's hard. On the other hand, if I increase the clock speed, the number of operations per second goes up, and your program also runs faster.

    Of course, commodity processors stopped getting faster clock speeds in 2003, while Moore's law keeps marching, so now the added complexity goes into more cores, which is useless for many applications.

    (FLOPS is used as a metric by the scientific computing community, which tends to deal with large, well structured problems which can be easily distributed across thousands of machines, and which use floating point arithmetic. It's a useful metric there, but it's not really useful for commodity machines.)

  17. Re:Hmmm... on Knuth Plans 'Earthshaking Announcement' Wednesday · · Score: 1

    Yep. It was called World War II.

  18. Re:I'm not clear on SCOTUS Rules Petiton Signatures Are Public Record · · Score: 1

    The 14th Amendment's so-called "Equal Protection Clause":

    "no state shall ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws"

    has been almost universally held by the Supreme Court to extend Bill of Rights protections to state laws.

  19. Re:Wait a sec on Best Way To Publish an "Indie" Research Paper? · · Score: 5, Informative

    If he is publishing in computer science, a conference counts as a publication exactly as much as a journal does. CS conferences are peer reviewed and the top tier ones are as prestigious as top tier journals in other fields. In CS, journals are used more as a record of a large body of work than as a venue for first publication.

  20. Re:Now What? on Intel Says Farewell To PCI Bus · · Score: 1

    Damn, I have one of those somewhere!

  21. Re:Planet Pantent Trolls on Kepler Mission Finds 752 Extrasolar Planet Candidates · · Score: 1

    Yes, but you can name them.

  22. Re:What on Washington's IT Guy · · Score: 1

    Er, no, the summary was bewildering. It should tell us who this guy is and what he does, and it should use complete sentences. Then it would be less bewildering.

  23. Biometrics are nonrevokable on Lenovo Trying Face Recognition For Logins On New Laptops · · Score: 1

    I haven't seen a mention here of the central problem with biometrics, so I will point it out. The central problem with biometrics is not that it can be faked, but that it cannot be revoked. No matter how good the biometric system, if someone does fake it, you can't change your biometrics. You can't change your face, your finger prints, your retinal print or whatever in the same way you can easily change a password if someone finds out your password. This is the real problem with biometrics, and one that can't be solved by making the biometrics better.

  24. Good choice on New York Times Bans Use of Word "Tweet" · · Score: 1

    Good job!

    While I use Twitter all the time, I personally hate the word "tweet". That being said, that is a bad reason to ban the use of a word.

    However, Mr. Corbett does give very good reasons to ban it in a paper for general audience. It is certainly not understandable to the many, many people who know very little about Twitter, it's a neologism used for a specific service that does not apply to other similar services, and, in the future when Twitter is dead and gone or transformed into something entirely different, historical articles that use the word "tweet" will seem either extremely dated or incomprehensible to future audiences. So, good job, Mr. Corbett!

  25. Re:So how can the computer do it then? on Germany Finds Kismet, Custom Code In Google Car · · Score: 1

    No, no, he got it right. It's just that the bytes got switeched around when converted to and from network byte order. Duh.