In other words, we're "supposed" to waste energy? I use my home computer for about 2 hours a day. Leaving the thing on for the other 22 hours a day is a waste of electricity, and it's fucking unethical.
If you had a sports car, would you leave the engine on 24/7? After all, the thing "never malfunctions" so why the heck would you ever have to restart your car? Pretty much anybody reading Slashdot would agree that doing such a thing is retarded, but when it comes to computers suddenly the energy doesn't matter?
Just because Linux can run for years doesn't mean it must, or should.
I think that anybody who leaves their system running when they don't need it is an environmentally insensitive dipshit.
an issue??? only if you're stupid enough to shut the thing down every night like most ms-windows users do...
Yeah. My desire to cut my electric bill in half is "stupid." My desire to increase my energy efficiency is "stupid." Attempting to be environmentally responsible is "stupid."
Unless you need your computer to be running 24/7, leaving it on is a tremendous waste of energy, and I think it's unethical. You're an ass.
Re:This is sort of cool, but...
on
Lego Logic Gates
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· Score: 1
Same with a transistor - it's not either ON or OFF, but can vary completely between those two states in an analog fashion.
I understand that, but analog behavior is not conducive to precise computations. It's too susceptible to noise and other influences from the surrounding environment.
There's a reason analog computers are no longer used. Digital is where it's at, and my point was that digital not not necessarily mean binary.
This is sort of cool, but...
on
Lego Logic Gates
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Although I find this cool from a purely geek standpoint, and while I realize that the guy probably doesn't intend this as a practical device, I can't help but wonder... WHY use a binary representation?
With electronic computers, binary makes sense. A capacitor is either charged, or not charged. A transistor is either conducting, or not conducting. It's HARD to make electronic devices with some fixed number of states other than two (let's disregard analog computation, with its infinite number of states, for now).
Yeah, this thing is like Babbage's machine in the sense that it computes mechanically, but Babbage's machine wasn't binary. It's EASY to make multi-state mechanical devices.
We shouldn't let our current computer technology make us too narrow-minded when designing new computer technologies. Binary representation is no Holy Grail, it's merely a convenience in the world of semiconductor electronics.
Jesus, I hope I'm wrong... I would have to acctualy buy MS crap.
Your statement is ironic in the extreme. The big risk here is NOT P2P apps. Here's the real risk.
Using one of these collision generators, I can create two x.509 certificate requests which have the same MD5 hash. One request says, "I am John Smith, kshdfkhs8i76y238888888" and the other request says, "I am Microsoft Corp., oiushir87dsfhgkjshdfg"
Now, I get Verisign to issue me a certificate for the first request. Since the hash is the same, I can rewrite the certificate to say that I am Microsoft Corp, and nobody will ever be able to tell the difference. Now, I am able to sign code as if I were Microsoft, and Dominate The Earth.
While this is technically true (there are an infinite number of passwords that hash to the same value), it's not of much practical use. There are only 256^8 possible 8-character passwords (less, if you don't allow un-typeable characters). There are 2^128 possible MD5 hashes. 256^8 is much, much, MUCH less than 2^128, thus the probability of discovering another valid passwords of 8 characters or less is negligible.
Sure, there are an infinite number of possible passwords, but they're all impossibly huge. I can come up with a password which is one trillion characters long and which hashes to the right result, but that's not practical.
You mean it's the dreaded STORY PROBLEM?????
Oh no! Students hate them, it requires work on the part of teacher to grade them...hmmm
They also put ESL students at a disadvantage, because the ability to parse and correctly identify the important aspects of a word problem depends just as much on language skills as on mathematical skills.
My fiancee struggled with math and physics word problems throughout her university education, not because she didn't understand the subject matter (she understood it quite well) but because she sometimes misinterpretted the problems. For example, sometimes it is hard to determine which quantity is being asked for. The fact that many professors have poor communication skills themselves doesn't help.
While I agree that learning English is a fundamental part of an American education, a mathematics class should not be an English class, and success/failure in a math class should definitely not hinge upon the students' proficiency in the English language.
Way to be down on the US man, except you forgot one thing - 28th out of fourty just doesn't work out to being in the bottom third, no matter what country you are from!
Wow, you vindicate the survey results in remarkable fashion. Or am I responding to a troll?
Re:Hmm, bad news title?
on
HIV Vaccine
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· Score: 2, Interesting
It doesn't stop HIV infections, but it prevents them into evolving into full-blown AIDS
The study only lasted one year. That's not enough time to really say whether it will prevent AIDS symptoms. They could, in theory, get sick next year, or next week.
reduces the risk of infection
No it doesn't, since the vaccine must be manufactured from a victim's own blood, and HIV virus from their own blood. The way I'm reading the article, it seems the vaccine is made on a person-by-person basis and can't be used on people who aren't already infected.
I interned at my current workplace (summers and winter breaks, with a 9 month full-time stint) starting in 1999, and when I graduated in 2002 I was immediately hired full time at a very respectable salary.
If I hadn't had my foot in the door, I really have no idea where I'd be at right now.
At first, I thought the headline read "Half-Life 2 Deathmarch" and I was trying to figure out how in the hell a product which has been successfully released already could be on a death march:-)
No it doesn't. Consider the machine instruction 0x90 on x86 architecture ("NOP"). Should the disassembler turn this into a "nop" or might it use "xor eax, 0"? I've seen disassemblers which do both.
Conversely, consider the instruction:
mov eax, [ebx + 0]
Should this produce "8B 03" or "8B 43 00" ?
Clearly the mapping is not one to one, in EITHER direction.
2) unless overloads.get_random() returns a list containing a single string element you're in for a runtime error.
No, the string substitution operator can take a non-sequence if there is only a single substitution. Come on, a 5 second experiment would have proven this:
/C/assembler/ Assembler programmers know what the computer is doing. C programmers have to guess (assuming they can't read assembler output).
I've looked at enough of GCC's assembly output to know what kinds of things it does for certain kinds of code...
And I don't see how assembly language is any more or less "on the machine" than C code, given the fact that computers do not execute assembly language -- they execute machine language.
Basically, you make a small deposit into an interest-bearing account. This account grows for hundreds of years, well after your death. Sometime in the future, time travel might be invented. At this point, an agent will travel back in time to a moment you select, pick you up and take you back to the future, where you will have access to the interest in your account (minus the cost of the time travel itself). After hundreds of years, it should amount to billions and billions of dollars.
As far as I can tell, this is a completely serious idea.
You can also measure from the height of the surrounding terrain. This is obviously trickier, since the surrounding terrain is seldom entirely flat.
That's not the only reason it's tricky. You also have to carefully define "surrounding," i.e., where is the boundary of the mountain? In the case of Mt. Everest in particular this is not at all obvious.
Uh, I think the point isn't necessarily that the brain works harder when lying, but that they can detect this. You can't see why that's extremely useful (in a terrifying sort of way)?
Sure, but wouldn't it be easy to get around this by constructing the lie beforehand and practicing it? At that point, telling the lie would be just like recounting any other story or fact.
Do you really want to go through each line, scrolling all the way to the end because your language has significant whitespace?
There is absolutely nothing that says you can't break things across lines. In most cases you don't even need a backslash to escape the linebreak. TRY the damn thing before criticizing it.
BTW, why would you want to get more proficient in C? Programmers are abandoning C in droves. It's just not programmer-time efficient to do things in C anymore.
Efficient use of programmer time is only one reason to select one language over another. I still code a lot in C on my own projects simply because I enjoy it. Yes, you heard right. I enjoy hunting down stupid off-by-one errors, iteration bugs, memory corruption, silently conflicting declarations, prototype errors, implicit casting errors, rounding and truncation problems, etc.:-)
If all the C programmers vanish, what are we going to write the next generation of high-level languages in? Python? Do you really want a future where not a single person actually knows what is happening inside that CPU, just because "it's hard?"
Yes, programming C is very difficult. And I love it for that, just like I love climbing mountains. That's pretty damn hard, too. At least while programming C I can't accidentally kill myself.
Slashdot Mirror
If you had a sports car, would you leave the engine on 24/7? After all, the thing "never malfunctions" so why the heck would you ever have to restart your car? Pretty much anybody reading Slashdot would agree that doing such a thing is retarded, but when it comes to computers suddenly the energy doesn't matter?
Just because Linux can run for years doesn't mean it must, or should.
I think that anybody who leaves their system running when they don't need it is an environmentally insensitive dipshit.
Yeah. My desire to cut my electric bill in half is "stupid." My desire to increase my energy efficiency is "stupid." Attempting to be environmentally responsible is "stupid."
Unless you need your computer to be running 24/7, leaving it on is a tremendous waste of energy, and I think it's unethical. You're an ass.
I understand that, but analog behavior is not conducive to precise computations. It's too susceptible to noise and other influences from the surrounding environment.
There's a reason analog computers are no longer used. Digital is where it's at, and my point was that digital not not necessarily mean binary.
With electronic computers, binary makes sense. A capacitor is either charged, or not charged. A transistor is either conducting, or not conducting. It's HARD to make electronic devices with some fixed number of states other than two (let's disregard analog computation, with its infinite number of states, for now).
Yeah, this thing is like Babbage's machine in the sense that it computes mechanically, but Babbage's machine wasn't binary. It's EASY to make multi-state mechanical devices.
We shouldn't let our current computer technology make us too narrow-minded when designing new computer technologies. Binary representation is no Holy Grail, it's merely a convenience in the world of semiconductor electronics.
Your statement is ironic in the extreme. The big risk here is NOT P2P apps. Here's the real risk.
Using one of these collision generators, I can create two x.509 certificate requests which have the same MD5 hash. One request says, "I am John Smith, kshdfkhs8i76y238888888" and the other request says, "I am Microsoft Corp., oiushir87dsfhgkjshdfg"
Now, I get Verisign to issue me a certificate for the first request. Since the hash is the same, I can rewrite the certificate to say that I am Microsoft Corp, and nobody will ever be able to tell the difference. Now, I am able to sign code as if I were Microsoft, and Dominate The Earth.
Sure, there are an infinite number of possible passwords, but they're all impossibly huge. I can come up with a password which is one trillion characters long and which hashes to the right result, but that's not practical.
You're full of shit. Put up or shut up.
They also put ESL students at a disadvantage, because the ability to parse and correctly identify the important aspects of a word problem depends just as much on language skills as on mathematical skills.
My fiancee struggled with math and physics word problems throughout her university education, not because she didn't understand the subject matter (she understood it quite well) but because she sometimes misinterpretted the problems. For example, sometimes it is hard to determine which quantity is being asked for. The fact that many professors have poor communication skills themselves doesn't help.
While I agree that learning English is a fundamental part of an American education, a mathematics class should not be an English class, and success/failure in a math class should definitely not hinge upon the students' proficiency in the English language.
Wow, you vindicate the survey results in remarkable fashion. Or am I responding to a troll?
The study only lasted one year. That's not enough time to really say whether it will prevent AIDS symptoms. They could, in theory, get sick next year, or next week.
reduces the risk of infection
No it doesn't, since the vaccine must be manufactured from a victim's own blood, and HIV virus from their own blood. The way I'm reading the article, it seems the vaccine is made on a person-by-person basis and can't be used on people who aren't already infected.
I interned at my current workplace (summers and winter breaks, with a 9 month full-time stint) starting in 1999, and when I graduated in 2002 I was immediately hired full time at a very respectable salary.
If I hadn't had my foot in the door, I really have no idea where I'd be at right now.
He said it was fundamental to computer science. Like it or not, that is the name of the fucking discipline. Deal.
At first, I thought the headline read "Half-Life 2 Deathmarch" and I was trying to figure out how in the hell a product which has been successfully released already could be on a death march :-)
No it doesn't. Consider the machine instruction 0x90 on x86 architecture ("NOP"). Should the disassembler turn this into a "nop" or might it use "xor eax, 0"? I've seen disassemblers which do both.
Conversely, consider the instruction:
mov eax, [ebx + 0]
Should this produce "8B 03" or "8B 43 00" ?
Clearly the mapping is not one to one, in EITHER direction.
No, the string substitution operator can take a non-sequence if there is only a single substitution. Come on, a 5 second experiment would have proven this:
>>> print '%d' % 66
66
I didn't have to stick '66' in a list.
Instead of using the '+' operator to concatenate strings, build the entire result at once with the '%' operator:
G.spec_label[val] = '%s;%s' % (G.species[0], val)
This avoids creating and discarding a temporary intermediate result.
I've looked at enough of GCC's assembly output to know what kinds of things it does for certain kinds of code...
And I don't see how assembly language is any more or less "on the machine" than C code, given the fact that computers do not execute assembly language -- they execute machine language.
Time Travel Fund
Basically, you make a small deposit into an interest-bearing account. This account grows for hundreds of years, well after your death. Sometime in the future, time travel might be invented. At this point, an agent will travel back in time to a moment you select, pick you up and take you back to the future, where you will have access to the interest in your account (minus the cost of the time travel itself). After hundreds of years, it should amount to billions and billions of dollars.
As far as I can tell, this is a completely serious idea.
I sure hope you aren't that absolutist in your daily life...
That's not the only reason it's tricky. You also have to carefully define "surrounding," i.e., where is the boundary of the mountain? In the case of Mt. Everest in particular this is not at all obvious.
Uh, I think the point isn't necessarily that the brain works harder when lying, but that they can detect this. You can't see why that's extremely useful (in a terrifying sort of way)?
Sure, but wouldn't it be easy to get around this by constructing the lie beforehand and practicing it? At that point, telling the lie would be just like recounting any other story or fact.
Simple algorithm:
1. Apply an arbitrary ordering on the elements of the set to produce a list
2. Join the list
What's so frickin' hard?
There is absolutely nothing that says you can't break things across lines. In most cases you don't even need a backslash to escape the linebreak. TRY the damn thing before criticizing it.
Efficient use of programmer time is only one reason to select one language over another. I still code a lot in C on my own projects simply because I enjoy it. Yes, you heard right. I enjoy hunting down stupid off-by-one errors, iteration bugs, memory corruption, silently conflicting declarations, prototype errors, implicit casting errors, rounding and truncation problems, etc. :-)
If all the C programmers vanish, what are we going to write the next generation of high-level languages in? Python? Do you really want a future where not a single person actually knows what is happening inside that CPU, just because "it's hard?"
Yes, programming C is very difficult. And I love it for that, just like I love climbing mountains. That's pretty damn hard, too. At least while programming C I can't accidentally kill myself.