"Texting" ("tekstaus" in Finnish) means writing in a different font, that is markedly different from classic cursive writing. It has nothing to do with computers or mobile phones as such. You can see the font here.
Answering to myself... here's the Wikipedia Village Pump discussison about the proposal. The proposal was rejected (or at least not implemented), since it was thought to produce a disincentive for editing signed articles.
I submitted it to Wikipedia Village Pump about six months ago, but at the time it didn't go through to the implementation phase.
The basic idea was that a revision of an article could be peer reviewed, so that it could later be referenced as if approved by the peer reviewers. The idea looks actually quite much like the "flagged" revisions that are now under discussion.:-)
It is often a bad idea to select a project name that is a common dictionary word. It makes the project almost ungooglable and also dilutes the original meaning of the name -- I wonder if the nation of Switzerland wants to be associated with this piece of software. The global English dictionary namespace isn't running out yet, so we don't need to start reusing words.
The simpler problem of stopping WoW botting is easy. People bot in WoW because 'the grind' to level or gain faction rep is long and boring. Change the game so that people aren't rewarded for sinking so much time into the game. Problem solved.
There is a subfield of game theory which deals with exactly this problem. It is called Mechanism Design. In this case, the problem setting would be: "How to create a MMORPG so that using bots gets less incentive than not using bots?" One easy way to accomplish this would tie the rewards with actual role playing, such as interacting with other players. Grinding would gain a player nothing.
It's not impossible to write the Knuth's optimal line break algorithm in such a way that it continuously examines better lines as text comes in. The algorithm is based on backtracking, but it can be made to work also from beginning to end (reverse order).
Btw, I wrote a small Ruby implementation of the justification algorithm (for fixed-width fonts), which might be useful especially for emails. I was at one point thinking of doing a variable-width font version of the program to make it possible to do this on *server side*, but it has obvious problems (the web server must know about fonts). The program is here:
Err... 'evolution' results, if all goes well, in a local-maximum.
I don't comment on real world evolution, but genetic algorithms converge on the global optimum. You need to remember that GAs consist of two parts: crossover (combination of traits from the parents) and mutation (random change in a gene). If GAs consisted only of crossover, they would converge on local optima, but mutation causes the population to eventually break out from any non-global optima. Note that without crossover, there wouldn't be any convergence.
I don't see why the operating system is relevant for design like this. As far as this challenge goes, the innovation is in the application which drives the vehicle, not in the operating system. I believe that any modern OS would be stable enough and offer the relevant services (real-time scheduling etc.) for such an application. The same applies for coding environment mentioned in the article: there isn't an IDE or design model for OS X which is qualitatively better than an IDE or design model for any other major OS -- these things are OS-independent. Actually, the whole article (and the way it was posted) seems to be just a marketing plug for Apple. "See, OS X can drive a car!"
Your approach to the problem is very similar to mine: I also used dynamic programming to calculate sub-goals in a sparse table with relevant probabilities to keep the time complexity polynomial. However, I am pretty confident that the results my web app gives are correct.:-) Please, email me (address is found on my web page), and I'll show you the Java source code and the algorithm. We can then discuss the possible problems with more insight to how the calculator really works.
Digital imaging is pretty convenient, because it lets you skip film processing and (if you wish) have much greater amount of control over the output. However, I can't get myself to buy a digital camera because of the sheer price of the DSLR bodies. I am an amateur photographer, and I go through about a roll of film per two weeks. This means 26 rolls a year, and since the price of a slide film roll and development (or, alternatively, a B&W negative film roll and development at home) is about 8 euros, my habit costs me about 208 euros yearly in development costs. Amateur-grade film SLR bodies cost something like 200-400 euros. Compared to the cost of a DSLR body + memory cards + archival media, I can shoot many years and still have excess money for better lenses.:-)
I'm not saying anything about megapixels or image quality or anything, but this: if you are not a pro or planning to take a great amount of pictures, you should consider film photography for the price alone. Quality film bodies can be found at bargain prices from sellers of used equipment or even as new -- the digital stampede gave a boon to the film photogs.
If you find you do not like the hobby or if you do not possess the 'eye' for great photos, the money spent for trying out photography will be much less. However, if you later think you need a DSLR, the lenses in your film camera kit most likely fit the digital body. It's a win-win situation. Most digital photographers also have a film body for backup and special purpose films (B&W, IR).
Most important thing to remember is that digital and film photography have exactly the same rules when it comes to artistic talent. You can't spend more money and have better photographs -- even though they might be technically better, the subject is what makes the photograph interesting. Dante Stella has some more reasons why film might still be a viable alternative to digital. I suggest everyone read the article: Dante Stella is not a troll or a luddite, but a real photographer interested in digital.
There is an interesting article in The Nation about how American companies must nowadays take account what is decided in Brussels. It's a long, but pretty illuminating view about the change of focus in American corporate interests.
With the advent of digital cameras and inexpensive film scanners, processing of digital photographs has become the single greatest use of any image manipulation program. As a Linux user, I am using the GIMP as the primary tool for making basic adjustments to my photos. My usual workflow is as follows:
1. remove dust etc. with clone tool 2. rotate (if neccessary) 3. crop 4. levels 5. color balance, contrast adjustment (if neccessary) 6. unsharp mask
The GIMP fails to provide the tools I require in cases 2, 4, 5 and 6.
I haven't found any way to preview the rotating so that I just can rotate the canvas until I see that a line that I want to be horizontal (such as the horizont) is really horizontal. It usually takes me several tries to get a line straight.
Levels and color balance suffer from lack of 16-bit color. After basic levels or white balance restoration, the result seems pixellated. The fine tonality that was present in the original is usually gone. This becomes more evident if the picture requires more color manipulation. This is the one thing I would most like to see improved in the GIMP!
Unsharp mask tool doesn't have a preview. This means that I have to use select tool first to select an area that I wish to preview, and then do USM-undo-adjust-USM-undo-adjust cycle until I have found the right parameters. This is very much a hassle, but I actually expect USM preview to be present in the GIMP 2.2.
My message to developers is: keep up the good work! Just do not add any more of the ridiculous plug-ins and artistic filters. Keep working on digital imaging support!
At my university (Univ. of Helsinki), the students at the Maths department typeset the handwritten lecture notes as part of their LaTeX course. The lecture notes are divided to small stacks of perhaps 40 pages each, and the students form teams and divide the pages among them to do the job.
Everyone benefits: the students get LaTeX experience and curriculum units, and the professional staff needs only to proofread the results.
"But as the theme progressed, it came into the heart of Melkor to interweave matters of his own imagining that were not in accord with the theme of Iluvatar; for he sought therein to increase the power and the glory of the part assigned to himself."
"He now wove the new thoughts into his music, and straightway discord arose about him, and many that sang nigh him grew dispondent, and their thought was disturbed and their music faltered; but some began to attune their music to his rather than to the thought which they had first."
-- J.R.R Tolkien, The Silmarillion
I honestly do not undestand the apolegtic attitude for Peter Jackson expressed here on Slashdot. Especially I do not understand the claim that all the changes Jackson made were neccessary for the film to be succesful. In fact I say that most of the changes were not needed: Peter Jackson just had to make the story "more American" and "more dramatic" by changing the delicate web of characters, events and themes created by J.R.R. Tolkien. It appears that Jackson thought that he could create a better LotR than Tolkien by introducing exaggerated battle scenes and gut-wrenching folk psychology -- the problem is Jackson's overgrown ego, not the structure of the book.
It is obvious that the book needed to be edited into a script, and that is OK to me. That editing, however, should have taken place by cutting away some scenes and spoken lines from the book. To corrupt the basic ideas and themes of an original work can not be forgiven. Peter Jackson made (especially in TTT) compeletely inexplicable choices, and for instance perverted Theoden's character from a great warrior king to a mindless follower of others.
Tolkien himself commented an early non-filmed script (1958) by Zimmerman in his letter to Forrest J. Ackerman. Some of his comments are very thought-provoking, and seem to be directed straight to Peter Jackson. I urge everyone to read the letter and see what Tolkien really thought about movies based on his books.
Risk Probability Calculator
on
Help My Game - RISK
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I made a small web application to calculate battle odds for the board game Risk, because there were questions in our game group whether to attack or defend in certain situations. I thought I would share the address, if anyone is interested to see how various battle situations could turn up. The calculator is in the following web address:
Use of the program should be pretty straightforward: user chooses the number of attackers and defenders, checks the rules version and presses the button. The result diagram shows horizontally all possible end-states (the remaining forces in the winner's army) and vertically their probabilities.
The algorithm is exact, meaning that the result is not an approximation and thus does not vary in several battles with the same parameters. The program works in time O(n*m), where n is the number of attackers and m is the number of defenders. The program is made with Java.
You know perfectly well that M class planets only exist in Star Trek. The same applies also to tachyon fields.:-) And no earth-like planets have ever been discovered around Proxima Centauri...
I think you should not be modded down as troll, because this is a good indicator about the data quality found on Interesting 5 Slashdot posts.
No western philosophy discusses in too great of detail whether this world is real or not.
Then perhaps you haven't read enough western philosophy? The father of "modern" philosophy, Plato, believed that the world we see is only an incomplete projection from a world of ideas. His most famous example of this is the cave analogy, where the people in the cave only see the shadows of things in front of the cave entrance, and believe what they see in front of them is all there is.
Rene Descartes pondered what we can tell for sure about the world around us. His famous conclusion was "Cogito, ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am"). He meant, that one person may be just tormented by some demon who feeds him sensory information, but by thinking, the person can know for sure that he exists, and only that.
I think your claim that western philosophy doesn't discuss the reality of the world is false. Reading a few books by Nietzsche doesn't make anyone a philosopher. I would recommend an exellent book "Sophie's World" by Jostein Gaarder as an introduction to the basics of western philosophy.
Iain M. Banks is the best still-writing SF author. His Culture novels describe a future ultra-high-tech society very plausibly. If anyone ever wonders where humankind is heading (an optimistic vision), read Banks.
The books are also noted for much violence, blowing up big things and interesting cultural differences (heh). I would recommend starting from Player of Games or Use of Weapons.
User interface in a typical software project is not designed. It just emerges like a zombie from the development team, as features increase in the program under development. OSS projects need more skilled UI designers, not more user contriputed opinions about design issues. Remember the first rule of a UI designer:
Listen to your users, but ignore them.
When I attended UI classes, I learned that users typically lack...
wisdom
a sense of design
an undestanding of the medium
a language to express their desires
a willingness to break out of the box of existing solutions.
Real UI designers are a valuable commodity. They will not come from the ranks of the programmers, but they still are technically savvy people. The non-technical people will just have our computers treating us the same way they already do but with prettier pictures. Some of the slashdotters could maybe become real UI designers with real training, excercises and education, but not just by complaining about Linux installers.
First, a note of personal preference. Good scifi needs to be space opera: fleets of starships fighting with Ride of the Valkyries playing in background, exploding planets, tragic heroes and big stakes are a must. Small-scale (and low-tech) scifi can be pretty entertaining, but who wants to read about people living their everyday lives, when you can just watch your neighbour do that?
Frank Herbert's Dune series were long my favourite scifi novels. Deep ecological and religious themes are something not-so-often seen in scifi, and I belong to the rare few who actually likes Herbert's writing style.:-) However, a few years back, I discovered a Scottish writer called Iain M. Banks. His Culture books have all the elements I want: ultra-high tech (ships hiding in suns and manipulating planets with their effectors from lightyears away), a realistic look of a very advanced society , no given morals (except the Culture's very obscure ones) and thought-provoking endings. If you haven't read Banks yet, do yourself a favour and buy a book. I recommend starting with Player of Games or Use of Weapons. Then, if you want to know more about the Culture (the human utopian society), read the author's essay A few notes on The Culture.
Slashdot Mirror
"Texting" ("tekstaus" in Finnish) means writing in a different font, that is markedly different from classic cursive writing. It has nothing to do with computers or mobile phones as such. You can see the font here.
Answering to myself... here's the Wikipedia Village Pump discussison about the proposal. The proposal was rejected (or at least not implemented), since it was thought to produce a disincentive for editing signed articles.
Half a year ago I wrote an article about how to implement Wikipedia peer review with digital signatures:
http://cameralovesyou.net/random/wikipedia-digital-signatures.html
I wrote some time ago an article about peer reviewing Wikipedia:
http://cameralovesyou.net/random/wikipedia-digital-signatures.html
I submitted it to Wikipedia Village Pump about six months ago, but at the time it didn't go through to the implementation phase.
The basic idea was that a revision of an article could be peer reviewed, so that it could later be referenced as if approved by the peer reviewers. The idea looks actually quite much like the "flagged" revisions that are now under discussion. :-)
It is often a bad idea to select a project name that is a common dictionary word. It makes the project almost ungooglable and also dilutes the original meaning of the name -- I wonder if the nation of Switzerland wants to be associated with this piece of software. The global English dictionary namespace isn't running out yet, so we don't need to start reusing words.
The simpler problem of stopping WoW botting is easy. People bot in WoW because 'the grind' to level or gain faction rep is long and boring. Change the game so that people aren't rewarded for sinking so much time into the game. Problem solved.
There is a subfield of game theory which deals with exactly this problem. It is called Mechanism Design. In this case, the problem setting would be: "How to create a MMORPG so that using bots gets less incentive than not using bots?" One easy way to accomplish this would tie the rewards with actual role playing, such as interacting with other players. Grinding would gain a player nothing.
See what this guy did with his irrigation controller:
http://mobile.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/04/1228208
It's not impossible to write the Knuth's optimal line break algorithm in such a way that it continuously examines better lines as text comes in. The algorithm is based on backtracking, but it can be made to work also from beginning to end (reverse order).
Btw, I wrote a small Ruby implementation of the justification algorithm (for fixed-width fonts), which might be useful especially for emails. I was at one point thinking of doing a variable-width font version of the program to make it possible to do this on *server side*, but it has obvious problems (the web server must know about fonts). The program is here:
http://rbpar.rubyforge.org/
Stuff that Matters.
Err ... 'evolution' results, if all goes well, in a local-maximum.
I don't comment on real world evolution, but genetic algorithms converge on the global optimum. You need to remember that GAs consist of two parts: crossover (combination of traits from the parents) and mutation (random change in a gene). If GAs consisted only of crossover, they would converge on local optima, but mutation causes the population to eventually break out from any non-global optima. Note that without crossover, there wouldn't be any convergence.
I don't see why the operating system is relevant for design like this. As far as this challenge goes, the innovation is in the application which drives the vehicle, not in the operating system. I believe that any modern OS would be stable enough and offer the relevant services (real-time scheduling etc.) for such an application. The same applies for coding environment mentioned in the article: there isn't an IDE or design model for OS X which is qualitatively better than an IDE or design model for any other major OS -- these things are OS-independent. Actually, the whole article (and the way it was posted) seems to be just a marketing plug for Apple. "See, OS X can drive a car!"
Your approach to the problem is very similar to mine: I also used dynamic programming to calculate sub-goals in a sparse table with relevant probabilities to keep the time complexity polynomial. However, I am pretty confident that the results my web app gives are correct. :-) Please, email me (address is found on my web page), and I'll show you the Java source code and the algorithm. We can then discuss the possible problems with more insight to how the calculator really works.
If you like Risk (or LotR Risk), you might want to check out my Risk probability calculator. You may even find that you should adjust your tactics. :-)
Digital imaging is pretty convenient, because it lets you skip film processing and (if you wish) have much greater amount of control over the output. However, I can't get myself to buy a digital camera because of the sheer price of the DSLR bodies. I am an amateur photographer, and I go through about a roll of film per two weeks. This means 26 rolls a year, and since the price of a slide film roll and development (or, alternatively, a B&W negative film roll and development at home) is about 8 euros, my habit costs me about 208 euros yearly in development costs. Amateur-grade film SLR bodies cost something like 200-400 euros. Compared to the cost of a DSLR body + memory cards + archival media, I can shoot many years and still have excess money for better lenses. :-)
I'm not saying anything about megapixels or image quality or anything, but this: if you are not a pro or planning to take a great amount of pictures, you should consider film photography for the price alone. Quality film bodies can be found at bargain prices from sellers of used equipment or even as new -- the digital stampede gave a boon to the film photogs.
If you find you do not like the hobby or if you do not possess the 'eye' for great photos, the money spent for trying out photography will be much less. However, if you later think you need a DSLR, the lenses in your film camera kit most likely fit the digital body. It's a win-win situation. Most digital photographers also have a film body for backup and special purpose films (B&W, IR).
Most important thing to remember is that digital and film photography have exactly the same rules when it comes to artistic talent. You can't spend more money and have better photographs -- even though they might be technically better, the subject is what makes the photograph interesting. Dante Stella has some more reasons why film might still be a viable alternative to digital. I suggest everyone read the article: Dante Stella is not a troll or a luddite, but a real photographer interested in digital.
There is an interesting article in The Nation about how American companies must nowadays take account what is decided in Brussels. It's a long, but pretty illuminating view about the change of focus in American corporate interests.
With the advent of digital cameras and inexpensive film scanners, processing of digital photographs has become the single greatest use of any image manipulation program. As a Linux user, I am using the GIMP as the primary tool for making basic adjustments to my photos. My usual workflow is as follows:
1. remove dust etc. with clone tool
2. rotate (if neccessary)
3. crop
4. levels
5. color balance, contrast adjustment (if neccessary)
6. unsharp mask
The GIMP fails to provide the tools I require in cases 2, 4, 5 and 6.
I haven't found any way to preview the rotating so that I just can rotate the canvas until I see that a line that I want to be horizontal (such as the horizont) is really horizontal. It usually takes me several tries to get a line straight.
Levels and color balance suffer from lack of 16-bit color. After basic levels or white balance restoration, the result seems pixellated. The fine tonality that was present in the original is usually gone. This becomes more evident if the picture requires more color manipulation. This is the one thing I would most like to see improved in the GIMP!
Unsharp mask tool doesn't have a preview. This means that I have to use select tool first to select an area that I wish to preview, and then do USM-undo-adjust-USM-undo-adjust cycle until I have found the right parameters. This is very much a hassle, but I actually expect USM preview to be present in the GIMP 2.2.
My message to developers is: keep up the good work! Just do not add any more of the ridiculous plug-ins and artistic filters. Keep working on digital imaging support!
At my university (Univ. of Helsinki), the students at the Maths department typeset the handwritten lecture notes as part of their LaTeX course. The lecture notes are divided to small stacks of perhaps 40 pages each, and the students form teams and divide the pages among them to do the job.
Everyone benefits: the students get LaTeX experience and curriculum units, and the professional staff needs only to proofread the results.
I guess this proves that there really is something for everyone online.
And that there is someone for everything online.
"But as the theme progressed, it came into the heart of Melkor to interweave matters of his own imagining that were not in accord with the theme of Iluvatar; for he sought therein to increase the power and the glory of the part assigned to himself."
"He now wove the new thoughts into his music, and straightway discord arose about him, and many that sang nigh him grew dispondent, and their thought was disturbed and their music faltered; but some began to attune their music to his rather than to the thought which they had first."
-- J.R.R Tolkien, The Silmarillion
I honestly do not undestand the apolegtic attitude for Peter Jackson expressed here on Slashdot. Especially I do not understand the claim that all the changes Jackson made were neccessary for the film to be succesful. In fact I say that most of the changes were not needed: Peter Jackson just had to make the story "more American" and "more dramatic" by changing the delicate web of characters, events and themes created by J.R.R. Tolkien. It appears that Jackson thought that he could create a better LotR than Tolkien by introducing exaggerated battle scenes and gut-wrenching folk psychology -- the problem is Jackson's overgrown ego, not the structure of the book.
It is obvious that the book needed to be edited into a script, and that is OK to me. That editing, however, should have taken place by cutting away some scenes and spoken lines from the book. To corrupt the basic ideas and themes of an original work can not be forgiven. Peter Jackson made (especially in TTT) compeletely inexplicable choices, and for instance perverted Theoden's character from a great warrior king to a mindless follower of others.
Tolkien himself commented an early non-filmed script (1958) by Zimmerman in his letter to Forrest J. Ackerman. Some of his comments are very thought-provoking, and seem to be directed straight to Peter Jackson. I urge everyone to read the letter and see what Tolkien really thought about movies based on his books.
I made a small web application to calculate battle odds for the board game Risk, because there were questions in our game group whether to attack or defend in certain situations. I thought I would share the address, if anyone is interested to see how various battle situations could turn up. The calculator is in the following web address:
s k.jsp
http://db.cs.helsinki.fi/t/ipuustin/webrisk/webri
Use of the program should be pretty straightforward: user chooses the number of attackers and defenders, checks the rules version and presses the button. The result diagram shows horizontally all possible end-states (the remaining forces in the winner's army) and vertically their probabilities.
The algorithm is exact, meaning that the result is not an approximation and thus does not vary in several battles with the same parameters. The program works in time O(n*m), where n is the number of attackers and m is the number of defenders. The program is made with Java.
All comments are welcome!
You know perfectly well that M class planets only exist in Star Trek. The same applies also to tachyon fields. :-) And no earth-like planets have ever been discovered around Proxima Centauri...
I think you should not be modded down as troll, because this is a good indicator about the data quality found on Interesting 5 Slashdot posts.
Then perhaps you haven't read enough western philosophy? The father of "modern" philosophy, Plato, believed that the world we see is only an incomplete projection from a world of ideas. His most famous example of this is the cave analogy, where the people in the cave only see the shadows of things in front of the cave entrance, and believe what they see in front of them is all there is.
Rene Descartes pondered what we can tell for sure about the world around us. His famous conclusion was "Cogito, ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am"). He meant, that one person may be just tormented by some demon who feeds him sensory information, but by thinking, the person can know for sure that he exists, and only that.
I think your claim that western philosophy doesn't discuss the reality of the world is false. Reading a few books by Nietzsche doesn't make anyone a philosopher. I would recommend an exellent book "Sophie's World" by Jostein Gaarder as an introduction to the basics of western philosophy.
Iain M. Banks is the best still-writing SF author. His Culture novels describe a future ultra-high-tech society very plausibly. If anyone ever wonders where humankind is heading (an optimistic vision), read Banks.
The books are also noted for much violence, blowing up big things and interesting cultural differences (heh). I would recommend starting from Player of Games or Use of Weapons.
Listen to your users, but ignore them.
When I attended UI classes, I learned that users typically lack...
Real UI designers are a valuable commodity. They will not come from the ranks of the programmers, but they still are technically savvy people. The non-technical people will just have our computers treating us the same way they already do but with prettier pictures. Some of the slashdotters could maybe become real UI designers with real training, excercises and education, but not just by complaining about Linux installers.
First, a note of personal preference. Good scifi needs to be space opera: fleets of starships fighting with Ride of the Valkyries playing in background, exploding planets, tragic heroes and big stakes are a must. Small-scale (and low-tech) scifi can be pretty entertaining, but who wants to read about people living their everyday lives, when you can just watch your neighbour do that?
:-) However, a few years back, I discovered a Scottish writer called Iain M. Banks. His Culture books have all the elements I want: ultra-high tech (ships hiding in suns and manipulating planets with their effectors from lightyears away), a realistic look of a very advanced society , no given morals (except the Culture's very obscure ones) and thought-provoking endings. If you haven't read Banks yet, do yourself a favour and buy a book. I recommend starting with Player of Games or Use of Weapons. Then, if you want to know more about the Culture (the human utopian society), read the author's essay A few notes on The Culture.
Frank Herbert's Dune series were long my favourite scifi novels. Deep ecological and religious themes are something not-so-often seen in scifi, and I belong to the rare few who actually likes Herbert's writing style.