>>Cripe man, do you really think the Republican party mean republic? Does the Democratic party mean democracy?
Are you really claiming the Socialist Party isn't socialistic? Or that the Communist Party isn't communistic? Or the Green party isn't green? Sometimes the names and their purposes coincide. In this case, the history of socialism in France, the Socialist party of France, and how I defined socialism all coincide.
Or did you really miss my history lesson on Socialism-in-one-state? You might want to research that topic and the implications thereof before further embarrassing yourself.
>>Sorry friend, trying to redefine Socialism because a group of people you hang around with can't understand the difference between systems of government and economic systems doesn't change what the term means. It just means that they, and you, don't understand what it means.
So, in other words, you just completely fucking ignored what a modern socialist party did when they came to power (which agrees with my definition) in preference of whatever the hell it is you think socialism means. Well, done, sir!
>>Who bought up mass transit systems across the united states and shut them down?
Man, I wish they'd shut down the mass transit in LA. Maybe then they'd finally get their heads out of their asses and expand the interstates that haven't been upgraded since the 60s.
And literally, yeah, LA back in the day decided they would solve the traffic problem by expanding mass transit instead of expanding the roads. The snarling mess of traffic that millions of people have to deal with every day is a result of this idiotic "green" idea. By contrast, Orange County (part of the LA metropolitan region) has been consistently working on their roads since the 80s. While OC still is no picnic, when you transition from LA to OC at 7:30 at night, it's like a breath of fresh air as you speed up from 35 to 75.
LA, by contrast, runs the entire I-5 down to a single lane in the busiest part of the road. (The I-5 is the main north-south artery for the entire state.) And it's been that way since I was born.
But you can continue adding tiers to this, creating an entire network of violence, to greater and greater effect. Pacifists (dead nodes) are a problem, of course, but we'll just classify them as rule-breakers and have them beaten up until they leave or become violent.
Wasn't that sort of the notion of trust networks that Cory Doctorow talks about?
Of course, such a system probably wouldn't work in practice, and would be as badly exploited in real life as it would in EVE. There's entire networks of people (cough, Goonfleet) dedicated to griefing and breaking the system.
"...seem to be completely unaware that this poor implementation of Agile development is harmful to our velocity"
Oh, for fucks sake...
I'll say this once: Chop the little pointy horns of hair growing out of the side of your head, and get the fuck back to writing code, you stupid monkey.
>>So essentially you've tried to make the disingenuous argument, "Them thar govmint guys is takin' over them thar internets. Socialism!"
Uh, no. You might notice I was simply reporting what the term means nowadays (which is different from what Marx meant, and is different from what it meant in the early 1900s as well). You might not like the current definition, but that's what it is - government control of an industry. Some people, especially in the Chomsky crowd so popular here on Slashdot, define Fascism as the marriage of corporations and government (which isn't quite the same thing).
>>But believe it or not France -- that dastardly Socialist country -- is a Democracy.
France IS a democracy, AND has strong socialist elements to it. Under the current usage of the term, it's not either/or. In fact, it was during Stalin's day that there was a divorce between socialism and revolution, which he adopted in order to not have the USSR totally isolated by countries afraid of him actively working to overthrow their governments. Instead, he promoted a mixture of socialism and democracy in western countries which is, gasp, what we see today.
To wit: Nationalized industries Eliminated the death penalty Legalized illegal immigrants Raised minimum wage and lowered the workweek to 39 hours Instituted control over content in the media, liberalized other aspects of the media Banned certain forms of speech, including certain forms of speech on TV I can't recall if he was the guy that banned students from wearing crucifixes to school, but I wouldn't be surprised.
If they take control of ISPs to the extent that they can disconnect individual users at a whim, there's little difference between that and the "internet industry" (whatever that is) being nationalized.
>>Socialism is not a political system; it is an economic system.
Tell that to Marx or Lenin. It's the marriage of both.
>>So, since she doesn't walk in perfect lock-step with the "core" of the Republican party, she's not really a Republican? Apparently the GOP disagrees, since she's y'know, a member of the party.
There are members of each political party that are more or less conservative on a variety of issues, and she is one of the most liberal members of the GOP. So yeah, it doesn't surprise me, really that she'd want to curtain freedom of speech online.
Personally, I'd vote for the measure as long as Obama got a shiny gold sledgehammer he got to keep on his desk. Our messiah would ensure the Banhammer was only used for the purposes of good not evil, such as deleting users who can't use proper punctuation or spelling, or, well, nearly anyone who posts on the World of Warcraft forums. Oh, let's just pick one at random: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=47143292&postId=483932803&sid=1#176
Truly, the world would be a better place with forum trolls slain.
The last 2 years were DEM controlled sure, just as all the crap from the first 6 years came home to roost. Not exactly the fault of the DEM's that when the economy tanked, we'd ALREADY spent our way to 5 TRILLION in Debt unnecessarily. That made the NECESSARY spending for economic reasons tougher to deal with. Bush's last budget was 700 Billion deficit.
Wow, my head just exploded.
So let me follow your logic: 1) Bush's 700B deficit (which was manly due to spendulus)... was bad? 2) Obama's spending, which has doubled or tripled over Bush's record (also due to spendulus)... is good?
They both spent up a ton of money for the same reason, and both publicly expressed regret about doing so (who you choose to believe, of course, is left as an exercise for the reader).
A fair bit of the blame is due to the dems, especially Barney Frank. ("These two entities -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- are not facing any kind of financial crisis," said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee.) And the bill died in congress.
Search YouTube for some old Tabula Rasa (pre 2005) demos and be surprised how much alike it looks. I'm almost tempted to say they recycled some of the old graphic they didn't use for TR to make Aion now.
I actually played TR. There's not much similarity.
>>What does this have to do with Socialism? Really? The ignorant hyperbole coming from the right wing is unbelievable. I mean, do any of you even know what Socialism is? Or do you just know that it was a term co opted by the ignorant, vile fools who called themselves the National Socialist (NAZI) Party?
Godwin's Law.
But I'll feed the troll anyway. Socialism under the current usage of the word means state control of an industry. See for example many of the industries in France - this is why France is often considered a socialist country, though not all of its industries (by a long shot) are nationalized. Hence the worry by the right wing about Obamacare - they're worried (and rightly so) about the nationalizing of our health care industry.
>>Really? So Aion is just on par with EverQuest 2? City of Heroes and WoW were also released in 2004, is it only marginally better than those?
It's better than WoW, certainly. But WoW intentionally went for, what did they call it?, the "epic cartoon look". To me, it looks like all the buildings were made out of folded construction paper.
I mean that the graphics are about equivalent to video games that came out in 2004. When did Far Cry come out? 2004. And Far Cry looks better than this game, which uses the same engine, incidentally.
>>Maybe try playing with something better than EGA. Aion has amazing graphics and a beautiful game world... no serious reviewer has complained about those, so something tells me you're just a troll.
I play with all the detail settings turned on, at about 30fps.
And yeah, the reason I posted that was because I was tired of hearing all the bullshit from the reviewers about how beautiful the game is. There's a few nice areas, but by and large it is unimpressive.
I played the closed beta. It's not terribly impressive. People have been excited about the graphics, but they're kind of outdated... maybe top of the line stuff for 2004 or so. There are a few impressive areas in the game, though.
Gameplay and questing is not terribly fun. If you've ever done a Kill 30 Wasps or Gather 10 Herbs quest, you've done them all, and AION has a lot of this kind of stuff. I guess there's a story or whatever to read, and IIRC some quests have different options, but by and large I was completely bored while leveling up my character.
While I would like someone to knock WoW off its high horse (because the game really isn't designed as well as they think it is), I doubt AION is going to be it.
>>It is possible for games that use Games For Windows Live because it implements the same kind of secure gateway networking environment that Xbox360 uses.
Does it? I wish I could play L4D with my PC and my friend with a PC version of it, and my 2 friends who have the Xbox version.:/
We got really excited when we found that exactly four people in our group of friends had the title, but then... "Wait, you have the Xbox version??" Yeah.
Do you know of any titles off the top of your head that do interoperate between Xboxen and PCs?
If you have six classes of Math students, then you need six Math classes and you need to find the teachers for them. If a teacher dies/whatever, you still have six classes of Math students. Yes, the administration may have to scramble to find a replacement teacher, but that doesn't affect the scheduling of classes: substitute new Math teacher in place of dead Math teacher. >>My point is that these type of scheduling takes a long time to complete
The problem is a lot harder than most people think.
The issue isn't 180 kids wanting to take math. It's 180 kids that are taking wildly different class loads, but are all at the same level of math, and so need to be grouped together somehow into 6 classes, assigned only to teachers which are qualified to teach that class, but not teaching another class during the same time period.
If we ran our schools Japanese-style, with everyone taking the same classes together, the solution is simple: rotate your teachers through each of the classes - the kids stay in one class, but the teachers circulate.
But our college entrance requirements are so strict now, optional classes are now absolute constraints on the problem. Student A MUST have Precalculus, Sophomore English, American History, Science 3-4, and French 3-4, and wants to take Journalism 3-4 during period 4 during 2/3rds of the year and Volleyball during period 6 at the end of the year. Whereas student B needs chemistry, Sophomore English, French 3-4 (which only has enough students for one class, so they must all be scheduled together), AP US History, etc. This is combined with constraints put on the system by individual teachers (teacher C is a teacher on special assignment, and so can only work periods 1-3, teacher D is our only journalism teacher, and can only teach the newspaper class in Period 4).
If I recall correctly, the scheduling problem (or at least some variants of it) is NP-complete.
>>I think you are confusing slightly overweight with obesity.
It depends how you define obesity, I guess. If you go by BMI, I'm obese. If you go by body fat percentage, 19% is "acceptable".
But really, what studies have found is that being fat in and of itself is overshadowed by the exercise/lack of exercise factor. I'm not saying it doesn't matter - things like having large amounts of adipose tissue directly produce angiotensin, which will cause your blood pressure to rise regardless of how fit you are (though exercise will obviously help mitigate it). Likewise, diabetes can be mitigated by exercise, as exercise forces muscle cells to accept insulin, which means that it effectively lowers your insulin resistance, like a thiazolidinedione. So a fat person who exercises will be a lot better off than a slightly less fat person who doesn't (and is a lot more likely to have metabolic syndrome as a result).
>>Large companies are the enemy of freedom of speech, it's a long-standing fact of life.
It's true. Youtube has automated filters (I think) scanning for "copyrighted material". Even if you use something that is pretty clearly fair use they'll do a DMCA takedown on you. You can appeal it, but you lose the appeal automatically if someone else owns copyright on the work. They don't use any other test but that.
So essentially there's no such thing as Fair Use on Youtube, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if Flickr worked the same way. "Oh? Time owns the original image? You lose."
I'm not sure how you wrote a thread manager using setjmp()/longjmp() since those trample over the stack - you can't longjmp() down the stack, only up it, although I suppose you could setjmp() then modify the stack pointer and then longjmp() with a new stack, although whether this works is highly implementation-dependent
Yeah. (And this was from March 1999, so my memory is a little fuzzy on the details.)
IIRC, we'd statically allocate a stack, by having something like int my_stack[10000] inside a function which never returns, and then each thread would get a static stack inside of that space. Or something like that.
As I said in the other thread, we were kind of hosed by the spec, which stated that the threads had to return an int, and since not only did our thread manager spawn threads, but other threads could spawn threads, we couldn't alter this to be a struct, since they required ints to be returned. We didn't want to do what most did (which is to have a static value to hold the error status on a terminating thread), since it wouldn't be threadsafe in a preemptive environment.
I suppose we could have a static array keyed by the thread value to hold the error status. I guess, technically, it wouldn't be threadsafe either if it set an error status, terminated, and then got preempted, spawned a new thread with the same id, which then could immediately terminate and clear the error status. Unlikely, I guess, but we valued thread safety over anything else. I'm sure there's some way of doing it safely, though.
>>Google the term "out parameter." Or "Return a struct." Or "Bit-shift OR into a larger type."
No shit. We'd have returned a struct if we could have. If it was just the thread manager dealing with the return value, it would have been easy.
Did you miss the part where threads were required by spec to return an int? Since this value could be directly passed to another thread, we couldn't adjust the return value to a struct.
I think most other people in the class set a static variable indicating error, but we refused to do this as it wasn't threadsafe.
There is already a clear understanding of the cause of obesity via carbohydrate consumption, combined with the effects of said consumption on the production of advanced glycation endproducts (AGEs) in the brain, and their effect on cognitive function.
I'd be very cautious when using the words "clear understanding" with nearly anything in cognitive science. Scientists didn't even pay attention to neurotropic factors in the brain until relatively recently, and if you ignore factors that can cause neural growth (like... excercise - scientists are guessing that excercise is neurotropic since we need to often map out new areas when walking a lot) it's hard to make a statement that obsesity caused by eating too much is the cause of cognitive decline, as opposed to obesity caused by not exercising enough. In fact, I think that if you exercise a lot, obesity almost vanishes as a cause of a lot of problems.
You also have related issues like eating too much / not exercising enough contributes to diabetes, and having high blood glucose levels causes a wide variety of problems, such as damage to small blood vessels and a (likely related) decline in neural function.
But we're still in the stone age when it comes to all this kind of stuff.
It's got everything to do with the fact that some people want a URL bar to act as a Bar with URLs, and the Firefox Design Team wants the "Location" bar to deal with "everything you ever visited, ever, with ever-changing menus".
Amen, brother.
I didn't install Firefox 3 until there was a plugin to kill the Awesomebar. It really was a dealbreaker for me.
I hate UIs that try to be helpful but end up distracting or otherwise messing up a clean interface.
The old Google autocomplete was a great example of this - it'd type directly into the search bar while you typed in your search term, which means that if you typoed and needed to delete the last key entered, you'd delete the autocomplete instead, which broke, you know, typing. It was also distracting seeing text appear where you're typing, not only because it was constantly flashing words before your eyes, but also because if you're a touch typist you use the text up there to make sure you haven't typoed, and seeing an 'f' appear on the screen when you're about to type an 'm' triggers that correction reflex.
The current design is much better, with the dropdown box at least off to the side while you type in your search term.
Due to the vagaries of setjmp and longjmp (we were writing a thread manager) and the fact that in C, functions can only return one value we got into a situation where threads (by spec) must be allowed to return an integer, AND the thread manager would need to report if the thread died to the calling function as well (also using the same int). Our group batted it around for a while and didn't see any solutions that were threadsafe under all conditions, so we ended up just specifying that threads couldn't return -1. =)
We discovered that trick in O-chem lab too. You start with the percent yield to get an A on the lab and then back calculate your intermediate yields and amount of product you expected from the reagents you weighed. Fond memories.
Yeah, I breezed through chemistry with that. =)
Once I dumped my entire experiment on the ground (and the teacher saw it) so I made sure my numbers weren't TOO accurate when I finished the lab.
Slashdot Mirror
>>Cripe man, do you really think the Republican party mean republic? Does the Democratic party mean democracy?
Are you really claiming the Socialist Party isn't socialistic? Or that the Communist Party isn't communistic? Or the Green party isn't green? Sometimes the names and their purposes coincide. In this case, the history of socialism in France, the Socialist party of France, and how I defined socialism all coincide.
Or did you really miss my history lesson on Socialism-in-one-state? You might want to research that topic and the implications thereof before further embarrassing yourself.
>>Sorry friend, trying to redefine Socialism because a group of people you hang around with can't understand the difference between systems of government and economic systems doesn't change what the term means. It just means that they, and you, don't understand what it means.
So, in other words, you just completely fucking ignored what a modern socialist party did when they came to power (which agrees with my definition) in preference of whatever the hell it is you think socialism means. Well, done, sir!
>>Conditions effectively break the GPU SIMD (single instruction multiple data) model and bring the pipeline to a halt.
They're getting better. Hell, IIRC I think that when shaders first came out you couldn't do conditionals at all.
>>Who bought up mass transit systems across the united states and shut them down?
Man, I wish they'd shut down the mass transit in LA. Maybe then they'd finally get their heads out of their asses and expand the interstates that haven't been upgraded since the 60s.
And literally, yeah, LA back in the day decided they would solve the traffic problem by expanding mass transit instead of expanding the roads. The snarling mess of traffic that millions of people have to deal with every day is a result of this idiotic "green" idea. By contrast, Orange County (part of the LA metropolitan region) has been consistently working on their roads since the 80s. While OC still is no picnic, when you transition from LA to OC at 7:30 at night, it's like a breath of fresh air as you speed up from 35 to 75.
LA, by contrast, runs the entire I-5 down to a single lane in the busiest part of the road. (The I-5 is the main north-south artery for the entire state.) And it's been that way since I was born.
But you can continue adding tiers to this, creating an entire network of violence, to greater and greater effect. Pacifists (dead nodes) are a problem, of course, but we'll just classify them as rule-breakers and have them beaten up until they leave or become violent.
Wasn't that sort of the notion of trust networks that Cory Doctorow talks about?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whuffie
Of course, such a system probably wouldn't work in practice, and would be as badly exploited in real life as it would in EVE. There's entire networks of people (cough, Goonfleet) dedicated to griefing and breaking the system.
"...seem to be completely unaware that this poor implementation of Agile development is harmful to our velocity"
Oh, for fucks sake...
I'll say this once:
Chop the little pointy horns of hair growing out of the side of your head, and get the fuck back to writing code, you stupid monkey.
>>So essentially you've tried to make the disingenuous argument, "Them thar govmint guys is takin' over them thar internets. Socialism!"
Uh, no. You might notice I was simply reporting what the term means nowadays (which is different from what Marx meant, and is different from what it meant in the early 1900s as well). You might not like the current definition, but that's what it is - government control of an industry. Some people, especially in the Chomsky crowd so popular here on Slashdot, define Fascism as the marriage of corporations and government (which isn't quite the same thing).
>>But believe it or not France -- that dastardly Socialist country -- is a Democracy.
France IS a democracy, AND has strong socialist elements to it. Under the current usage of the term, it's not either/or. In fact, it was during Stalin's day that there was a divorce between socialism and revolution, which he adopted in order to not have the USSR totally isolated by countries afraid of him actively working to overthrow their governments. Instead, he promoted a mixture of socialism and democracy in western countries which is, gasp, what we see today.
Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.
Here, educate yourself as to Francois Mitterand and what he did to France after he and the Socialist Party came to power:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Mitterrand#1st_term
To wit:
Nationalized industries
Eliminated the death penalty
Legalized illegal immigrants
Raised minimum wage and lowered the workweek to 39 hours
Instituted control over content in the media, liberalized other aspects of the media
Banned certain forms of speech, including certain forms of speech on TV
I can't recall if he was the guy that banned students from wearing crucifixes to school, but I wouldn't be surprised.
If they take control of ISPs to the extent that they can disconnect individual users at a whim, there's little difference between that and the "internet industry" (whatever that is) being nationalized.
>>Socialism is not a political system; it is an economic system.
Tell that to Marx or Lenin. It's the marriage of both.
>>So, since she doesn't walk in perfect lock-step with the "core" of the Republican party, she's not really a Republican? Apparently the GOP disagrees, since she's y'know, a member of the party.
There are members of each political party that are more or less conservative on a variety of issues, and she is one of the most liberal members of the GOP. So yeah, it doesn't surprise me, really that she'd want to curtain freedom of speech online.
Personally, I'd vote for the measure as long as Obama got a shiny gold sledgehammer he got to keep on his desk. Our messiah would ensure the Banhammer was only used for the purposes of good not evil, such as deleting users who can't use proper punctuation or spelling, or, well, nearly anyone who posts on the World of Warcraft forums. Oh, let's just pick one at random: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=47143292&postId=483932803&sid=1#176
Truly, the world would be a better place with forum trolls slain.
The last 2 years were DEM controlled sure, just as all the crap from the first 6 years came home to roost. Not exactly the fault of the DEM's that when the economy tanked, we'd ALREADY spent our way to 5 TRILLION in Debt unnecessarily. That made the NECESSARY spending for economic reasons tougher to deal with. Bush's last budget was 700 Billion deficit.
Wow, my head just exploded.
So let me follow your logic:
1) Bush's 700B deficit (which was manly due to spendulus)... was bad?
2) Obama's spending, which has doubled or tripled over Bush's record (also due to spendulus)... is good?
They both spent up a ton of money for the same reason, and both publicly expressed regret about doing so (who you choose to believe, of course, is left as an exercise for the reader).
A fair bit of the blame is due to the dems, especially Barney Frank. ("These two entities -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- are not facing any kind of financial crisis," said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee.) And the bill died in congress.
Educate yourself:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/11/business/new-agency-proposed-to-oversee-freddie-mac-and-fannie-mae.html?sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print
Search YouTube for some old Tabula Rasa (pre 2005) demos and be surprised how much alike it looks. I'm almost tempted to say they recycled some of the old graphic they didn't use for TR to make Aion now.
I actually played TR. There's not much similarity.
>>What does this have to do with Socialism? Really? The ignorant hyperbole coming from the right wing is unbelievable. I mean, do any of you even know what Socialism is? Or do you just know that it was a term co opted by the ignorant, vile fools who called themselves the National Socialist (NAZI) Party?
Godwin's Law.
But I'll feed the troll anyway. Socialism under the current usage of the word means state control of an industry. See for example many of the industries in France - this is why France is often considered a socialist country, though not all of its industries (by a long shot) are nationalized. Hence the worry by the right wing about Obamacare - they're worried (and rightly so) about the nationalizing of our health care industry.
>>Really? So Aion is just on par with EverQuest 2? City of Heroes and WoW were also released in 2004, is it only marginally better than those?
It's better than WoW, certainly. But WoW intentionally went for, what did they call it?, the "epic cartoon look". To me, it looks like all the buildings were made out of folded construction paper.
I mean that the graphics are about equivalent to video games that came out in 2004. When did Far Cry come out? 2004. And Far Cry looks better than this game, which uses the same engine, incidentally.
>>Maybe try playing with something better than EGA. Aion has amazing graphics and a beautiful game world... no serious reviewer has complained about those, so something tells me you're just a troll.
I play with all the detail settings turned on, at about 30fps.
And yeah, the reason I posted that was because I was tired of hearing all the bullshit from the reviewers about how beautiful the game is. There's a few nice areas, but by and large it is unimpressive.
I played the closed beta. It's not terribly impressive. People have been excited about the graphics, but they're kind of outdated... maybe top of the line stuff for 2004 or so. There are a few impressive areas in the game, though.
Gameplay and questing is not terribly fun. If you've ever done a Kill 30 Wasps or Gather 10 Herbs quest, you've done them all, and AION has a lot of this kind of stuff. I guess there's a story or whatever to read, and IIRC some quests have different options, but by and large I was completely bored while leveling up my character.
While I would like someone to knock WoW off its high horse (because the game really isn't designed as well as they think it is), I doubt AION is going to be it.
>>It is possible for games that use Games For Windows Live because it implements the same kind of secure gateway networking environment that Xbox360 uses.
Does it? I wish I could play L4D with my PC and my friend with a PC version of it, and my 2 friends who have the Xbox version. :/
We got really excited when we found that exactly four people in our group of friends had the title, but then... "Wait, you have the Xbox version??" Yeah.
Do you know of any titles off the top of your head that do interoperate between Xboxen and PCs?
If you have six classes of Math students, then you need six Math classes and you need to find the teachers for them. If a teacher dies/whatever, you still have six classes of Math students. Yes, the administration may have to scramble to find a replacement teacher, but that doesn't affect the scheduling of classes: substitute new Math teacher in place of dead Math teacher.
>>My point is that these type of scheduling takes a long time to complete
The problem is a lot harder than most people think.
The issue isn't 180 kids wanting to take math. It's 180 kids that are taking wildly different class loads, but are all at the same level of math, and so need to be grouped together somehow into 6 classes, assigned only to teachers which are qualified to teach that class, but not teaching another class during the same time period.
If we ran our schools Japanese-style, with everyone taking the same classes together, the solution is simple: rotate your teachers through each of the classes - the kids stay in one class, but the teachers circulate.
But our college entrance requirements are so strict now, optional classes are now absolute constraints on the problem. Student A MUST have Precalculus, Sophomore English, American History, Science 3-4, and French 3-4, and wants to take Journalism 3-4 during period 4 during 2/3rds of the year and Volleyball during period 6 at the end of the year. Whereas student B needs chemistry, Sophomore English, French 3-4 (which only has enough students for one class, so they must all be scheduled together), AP US History, etc. This is combined with constraints put on the system by individual teachers (teacher C is a teacher on special assignment, and so can only work periods 1-3, teacher D is our only journalism teacher, and can only teach the newspaper class in Period 4).
If I recall correctly, the scheduling problem (or at least some variants of it) is NP-complete.
>>I think you are confusing slightly overweight with obesity.
It depends how you define obesity, I guess. If you go by BMI, I'm obese. If you go by body fat percentage, 19% is "acceptable".
But really, what studies have found is that being fat in and of itself is overshadowed by the exercise/lack of exercise factor. I'm not saying it doesn't matter - things like having large amounts of adipose tissue directly produce angiotensin, which will cause your blood pressure to rise regardless of how fit you are (though exercise will obviously help mitigate it). Likewise, diabetes can be mitigated by exercise, as exercise forces muscle cells to accept insulin, which means that it effectively lowers your insulin resistance, like a thiazolidinedione. So a fat person who exercises will be a lot better off than a slightly less fat person who doesn't (and is a lot more likely to have metabolic syndrome as a result).
>>Large companies are the enemy of freedom of speech, it's a long-standing fact of life.
It's true. Youtube has automated filters (I think) scanning for "copyrighted material". Even if you use something that is pretty clearly fair use they'll do a DMCA takedown on you. You can appeal it, but you lose the appeal automatically if someone else owns copyright on the work. They don't use any other test but that.
So essentially there's no such thing as Fair Use on Youtube, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if Flickr worked the same way. "Oh? Time owns the original image? You lose."
I'm not sure how you wrote a thread manager using setjmp()/longjmp() since those trample over the stack - you can't longjmp() down the stack, only up it, although I suppose you could setjmp() then modify the stack pointer and then longjmp() with a new stack, although whether this works is highly implementation-dependent
Yeah. (And this was from March 1999, so my memory is a little fuzzy on the details.)
IIRC, we'd statically allocate a stack, by having something like int my_stack[10000] inside a function which never returns, and then each thread would get a static stack inside of that space. Or something like that.
As I said in the other thread, we were kind of hosed by the spec, which stated that the threads had to return an int, and since not only did our thread manager spawn threads, but other threads could spawn threads, we couldn't alter this to be a struct, since they required ints to be returned. We didn't want to do what most did (which is to have a static value to hold the error status on a terminating thread), since it wouldn't be threadsafe in a preemptive environment.
I suppose we could have a static array keyed by the thread value to hold the error status. I guess, technically, it wouldn't be threadsafe either if it set an error status, terminated, and then got preempted, spawned a new thread with the same id, which then could immediately terminate and clear the error status. Unlikely, I guess, but we valued thread safety over anything else. I'm sure there's some way of doing it safely, though.
Thanks for the reference on ucontext. =)
>>Google the term "out parameter." Or "Return a struct." Or "Bit-shift OR into a larger type."
No shit. We'd have returned a struct if we could have. If it was just the thread manager dealing with the return value, it would have been easy.
Did you miss the part where threads were required by spec to return an int? Since this value could be directly passed to another thread, we couldn't adjust the return value to a struct.
I think most other people in the class set a static variable indicating error, but we refused to do this as it wasn't threadsafe.
There is already a clear understanding of the cause of obesity via carbohydrate consumption, combined with the effects of said consumption on the production of advanced glycation endproducts (AGEs) in the brain, and their effect on cognitive function.
I'd be very cautious when using the words "clear understanding" with nearly anything in cognitive science. Scientists didn't even pay attention to neurotropic factors in the brain until relatively recently, and if you ignore factors that can cause neural growth (like... excercise - scientists are guessing that excercise is neurotropic since we need to often map out new areas when walking a lot) it's hard to make a statement that obsesity caused by eating too much is the cause of cognitive decline, as opposed to obesity caused by not exercising enough. In fact, I think that if you exercise a lot, obesity almost vanishes as a cause of a lot of problems.
You also have related issues like eating too much / not exercising enough contributes to diabetes, and having high blood glucose levels causes a wide variety of problems, such as damage to small blood vessels and a (likely related) decline in neural function.
But we're still in the stone age when it comes to all this kind of stuff.
It's got everything to do with the fact that some people want a URL bar to act as a Bar with URLs, and the Firefox Design Team wants the "Location" bar to deal with "everything you ever visited, ever, with ever-changing menus".
Amen, brother.
I didn't install Firefox 3 until there was a plugin to kill the Awesomebar. It really was a dealbreaker for me.
I hate UIs that try to be helpful but end up distracting or otherwise messing up a clean interface.
The old Google autocomplete was a great example of this - it'd type directly into the search bar while you typed in your search term, which means that if you typoed and needed to delete the last key entered, you'd delete the autocomplete instead, which broke, you know, typing. It was also distracting seeing text appear where you're typing, not only because it was constantly flashing words before your eyes, but also because if you're a touch typist you use the text up there to make sure you haven't typoed, and seeing an 'f' appear on the screen when you're about to type an 'm' triggers that correction reflex.
The current design is much better, with the dropdown box at least off to the side while you type in your search term.
Due to the vagaries of setjmp and longjmp (we were writing a thread manager) and the fact that in C, functions can only return one value we got into a situation where threads (by spec) must be allowed to return an integer, AND the thread manager would need to report if the thread died to the calling function as well (also using the same int). Our group batted it around for a while and didn't see any solutions that were threadsafe under all conditions, so we ended up just specifying that threads couldn't return -1. =)
Cost us 5% off the final grade, I think.
We discovered that trick in O-chem lab too. You start with the percent yield to get an A on the lab and then back calculate your intermediate yields and amount of product you expected from the reagents you weighed. Fond memories.
Yeah, I breezed through chemistry with that. =)
Once I dumped my entire experiment on the ground (and the teacher saw it) so I made sure my numbers weren't TOO accurate when I finished the lab.
>>Hell is where the Chefs are British, the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss, the Police are German and it's all organised by the Italians."
'I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse'
-Charles V, HRE