Well you certainly aren't working in animation or writing simulations, or writing AI programs, or code for robots, or doing any kind of graphics conversion, or audio programming or making any kind of games with your "programming"(I'll stop here, but I could go on and on). I would guess with your attitude toward math you're really not a programmer, you probably just tie stuff together that other people have written with your own code or scripts. You use libraries rather than write them. Not trying to insult what you do, but there's a lot more to programming than that, and it does take math.
And you are wrong about algorithms. Algorithms is math. No ifs, ands or buts about it.
>> I could give a fuck about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs - my hierarchy of needs says that I need this job.
Of course you don't care - survival is your primary concern! A stable situation, job, regular income. Once you have those things under control, then perhaps you could be interested in learning about someone's hierarchy of needs. But more likely you'll be interested in sex - getting a girlfriend, etc. So first the job, the regular income, the steady girlfriend, oh and that car you've always wanted. Then perhaps you could be interested in Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
A general solution can be written for any (n^k)-1 puzzle using the A* algorithm. To implement A* you calculate the value of your state, and the value of each successive state. The possible successive state that gets you closest to the goal state is the state you move to next. You keep track of all visited states, so you don't keep following paths that don't reach your goal.
With a 15-puzzle, you can develop a heuristic that allows you to determine how far you are away from the goal, as well as how far each successive state is from the goal. With the same algorithm you can extend your solution to solve any (n^k)-1 puzzle.
This was actually a programming assignment in a previous class of mine. We had to implement A* and then use it to solve (n^k)-1, missionary-and-cannibal, and the shortest path problem. (and if you're interested and/or masochistic, check out the other projects that we had to complete in the space of a semester)
Jerry: Just a movie? You don't understand. This isn't plans one through eight from outer space. This is plan nine from outer space. This is the one that worked. The worst movie ever made!
Evolution has one very serious flaw: no one has ever demonstrated how or where that first cell came from. Strange, how much we think we know, yet nobody has ever seen or demonstrated the creation of even a single-celled object.
So, unfortunately for you, any explanation of where life began is nothing more than a belief.
Looking beyond all the mathematical improbabilities that miraculously converged to enable this planet to sustain life in the first place, it is indeed obvious that man is quite unique among the millions of species that live on this planet. We own this place; we are its stewards, like it or not.
I'm not trying to persuade you that your atheism is wrong, just demonstrating that atheism is a belief system just like religions are. You simply choose to believe that God doesn't exist.
But don't think that believing we came to exist as a result of some infintesimal probability is any more sane than someone who looks at life around him, as well as humankind's uniqueness not only on this planet, but in the universe, as the result of a benevolent Creator.
First of all, I'd like to confess that I'm somewhat of a Michael Moore fan. I've enjoyed his books and movies ever since Roger and Me, I've went to a booksigning of his just to meet him and get a signed book, and I made it a point to see Fahrenheit 9/11 on the first day it was out.
That said, I tend to look at most things, Moore's movies included, with a critical eye. The biggest problems I have with this movie are not with its content, but the way the content will be recieved. Moore has created an extremely powerful movie, but will it meet its goal of persuading people to change their minds about Bush or the war against terrorism? I really don't think so, and I'll explain why.
The crowd at the theater had already made up their minds about Bush. The movies main points - Bush was elected unfairly, Bush is an idiot who didn't know what to do for seven minutes after the second plane hit the tower, Bush diverted attention to creating a war against Iraq as soon as possible, and that he lied to the American people - were all applauded loudly by the crowd inside. Moore used an extreme amount of artistic licence and left out many facts to make his point, and the audience lapped up his viewpoint without question. This was not an audience that needed any additional persuading not to vote for Bush. Perhaps conservatives are seeing the movie in other theaters or waiting until the lines die down. But I didn't see them or hear any of them at the showing I attended.
The thing is, people who are still on the fence about who to vote for this November are likely to be those who need to understand both sides of the story. This movie deliberately sidesteps anything that could be used to question its points of view. Anyone who needs to see a different viewpoint about the things in Moore's movie will have to look elsewhere. When they do, it will become immediately apparent how Moore deliberately avoided lots of obvious things to make the points he did.
For instance, the movie states that with any possible recount, Gore would have been re-elected. That's a rather narrow viewpoint, because with both the recount the Supreme Court stopped and with the recount Gore wanted, Gore still would have lost. What Moore meant, but didn't say was that with any possible statewide recount with a certain arbitrary standard applied uniformly, Gore would have come out ahead. But we are made to believe that the Supreme Court stopped a process that would have resulted in a Gore presidency. Not true.
Richard Clarke appears in this movie where he states the Bush administration too quickly focused on Iraq, which weakened our war with Al-Qaeda. The movie also makes you believe that Bush was behind getting the Bin Laden's family out of the U.S. before the general ban on flight was lifted. What it doesn't say is that the flights didn't begin until the ban was lifted - and the authorization to get the Bin Ladens out of the country was made by Clarke himself.
Anyone wanting to dig a little will have no problem finding out that Moore was against taking action against Afghanistan when we did. But one of this movie's main points was that we didn't go after Osama hard enough and fast enough.
Moore portrays Iraq before we bombed it as an idyllic place, with children playing in the streets and happy citizens going about their business. This at the very least ignores the basic facts about Sadaam's murderous regime. For someone who really wanted to examine the facts, they could easily find out that more people were killed and maimed each year under Sadaam's regime than under the occupation. But this is opposite of the impression we get from this movie.
That's not to say this movie didn't score any points with this skeptical viewer. The scene of the contractors convention designed to teach people how to profit from the war turned my stomach. Watching the blank stare on Bush's face after he was told about the second plane made me seriously wonder about his competence. And I hadn't realized the extent the
After using SpamAssassin for quite a while, it just wasn't cutting it - 75%-80% accuracy is still a lot of spam to go through and delete. I added DSpam to my mail server and my spam catching rate is now better than 99%.
DSpam also came with much better directions for integrating with Exim than did SpamAssassin. As fond as I was of SpamAssassin, they have some catching up to do.
jeez...where are some of you people going to school anyway? I'm finishing up my junior year at UNM and already I have done the following:
taken standard algorithms out of CLR and improved upon them, then wrote extensive papers on how much these were improved(quicksort, skiplists) over the published algorithms.
written a logo(you know, turtle graphics) interpreter in Scheme. A fricken 2000-line interpreter in Scheme.
written malloc(as one of many examples) in assembly language.
wrote a hash table class that fully implements the java.util.Map interface and then used it as part of my own custom spam filtering program - the spec also made it so it would work on any UNIX system with procmail.
This is but a subset of what I've had to do, and I'm not even in my senior year yet! I don't go to Carnegie Mellon or MIT either, I go to UNM. And yet I constantly read about stories such as yours where people are graduating with CS degrees without having to do much work.
At any rate, take heart - at least some of us will be graduating knowing something about CS.
(of course this may explain why even C students from here get recruited by Microsoft, IBM, HP, et. al.)
So, I take it you pay your tech guys 10 dollars an hour and regard them as steaming piles of shit? I wonder what your company would do without its data? If this is the attitude your company holds about its technical staff I have a feeling you will find out sooner or later.
Mind letting us know what Fortune 50 company you work for? I personally would like to short your stock.
Ahem. If your site doesn't belong at number 1 for relavent searches, then you've tricked Google into returning something it shouldn't have, thereby reducing the value of its search.
Google should then rightfully ban your site.
If you want to be number one for a particular search, then your site had damn well be the best site for that search. The "best site", by definition is the one most people will visit and recommend and the one other sites will link to the most.
If your site is truly the best one that fits the search, it will make it to number one on Google all by itself. Your best bet would be to hire a consultant to help your business become the best in its field, not to hire one that somehow manages to float your crappy site to the top.
Linux "community"? Oh come on, you can't even get two Slashdot users to agree on the same thing. There must be two different distros for each user. About the only thing that "unites" us as a community is our massive hatred of SCO. Oh wait.
Being able to factor an RSA number is big news because it says that an RSA encoded message with a number of that size (576) can be defeated.
Just a clarification...I know you probably know what you meant, but a casual reader may not...this is not a 576 digit number, but a 576 bit number - the value is on the order of 2^576 - a f*'in big number to factor.
Library sales are a major source of a lot of the dealers already on amazon. The books are going to end up there anyway; if the libraries can sell them directly, I say more power to them.
...a tool like MS Access in the hands of managers with just enough knowledge to be dangerous is a BAD thing.
Step 1: Provide MBA's with wizard-based software. MBA decides to save money by developing his own apps.
Step 2: MBA-developed apps within the company start to cause confusion, productivity loss, and overtime due to bad design, spaghetti code, etc.
Step 3: Company decides to hire professional developers to clean up the mess. The cost is greater than it would have been had they paid for the development help in the first place.
Woah nellie, that's some mighty complex math there champ, I better go back and get a Phd in statistical methods so I can grasp your amazing wizardry!
No, a BS in CS will do. I'm not claiming amazing wizardry, either, but it's certainly beyond your grasp or the grasp of anyone who claims a bachelors in CS is a waste of someones time.
In the real world math, logic and computer science theory don't matter as much as you think they do.
In the real world, programs that I write will run orders of magnitude faster than ones that you write. Of course, this may not matter to you, writing simple web or dialog box code that interfaces with a db containing a few thousand items(or less). But my code can scale to processing millions, even billions of items. Can you say that? Of course not, you wouldn't know the difference between an n^2 and a log(n) algorithm if it smacked you in the face.
You may be a code monkey, but I know the difference, and so do my employers and clients.
smells like a reptile, and acts like a reptile, its a reptile. Giving it a pretty name doesn't change the fact its a slimy creature you should never turn your back on.
You're right...lets be realistic...we need this technology, and the kids keep "losing" the ID tags, so whats the next step? Lets implant the ID chips so the children never lose them.
(do I even need to explain the implications of this?)
Me. I have been waiting for HP to make a calculator that has HP's famous tactile buttons like those found on the HP 48(not the rubbery crap they put on their first-gen 49's), RPN, and symbolic calculation that rivals my TI-89.
In fact I had been checking their site daily since I first heard rumors they were building such a calculator, and like a teenage Britney Spears fan, I plan on buying one as soon as my next allowance comes in.
Slashdot Mirror
Well you certainly aren't working in animation or writing simulations, or writing AI programs, or code for robots, or doing any kind of graphics conversion, or audio programming or making any kind of games with your "programming"(I'll stop here, but I could go on and on). I would guess with your attitude toward math you're really not a programmer, you probably just tie stuff together that other people have written with your own code or scripts. You use libraries rather than write them. Not trying to insult what you do, but there's a lot more to programming than that, and it does take math.
And you are wrong about algorithms. Algorithms is math. No ifs, ands or buts about it.
Blame it on the pointy-haired boss. But don't take it too far.
/ dilbert-20050213.html
http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/archive
Of course you don't care - survival is your primary concern! A stable situation, job, regular income. Once you have those things under control, then perhaps you could be interested in learning about someone's hierarchy of needs. But more likely you'll be interested in sex - getting a girlfriend, etc. So first the job, the regular income, the steady girlfriend, oh and that car you've always wanted. Then perhaps you could be interested in Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
A general solution can be written for any (n^k)-1 puzzle using the A* algorithm. To implement A* you calculate the value of your state, and the value of each successive state. The possible successive state that gets you closest to the goal state is the state you move to next. You keep track of all visited states, so you don't keep following paths that don't reach your goal.
With a 15-puzzle, you can develop a heuristic that allows you to determine how far you are away from the goal, as well as how far each successive state is from the goal. With the same algorithm you can extend your solution to solve any (n^k)-1 puzzle.
This was actually a programming assignment in a previous class of mine. We had to implement A* and then use it to solve (n^k)-1, missionary-and-cannibal, and the shortest path problem. (and if you're interested and/or masochistic, check out the other projects that we had to complete in the space of a semester)
Evolution has one very serious flaw: no one has ever demonstrated how or where that first cell came from. Strange, how much we think we know, yet nobody has ever seen or demonstrated the creation of even a single-celled object.
So, unfortunately for you, any explanation of where life began is nothing more than a belief.
Looking beyond all the mathematical improbabilities that miraculously converged to enable this planet to sustain life in the first place, it is indeed obvious that man is quite unique among the millions of species that live on this planet. We own this place; we are its stewards, like it or not.
I'm not trying to persuade you that your atheism is wrong, just demonstrating that atheism is a belief system just like religions are. You simply choose to believe that God doesn't exist.
But don't think that believing we came to exist as a result of some infintesimal probability is any more sane than someone who looks at life around him, as well as humankind's uniqueness not only on this planet, but in the universe, as the result of a benevolent Creator.
First of all, I'd like to confess that I'm somewhat of a Michael Moore fan. I've enjoyed his books and movies ever since Roger and Me, I've went to a booksigning of his just to meet him and get a signed book, and I made it a point to see Fahrenheit 9/11 on the first day it was out.
That said, I tend to look at most things, Moore's movies included, with a critical eye. The biggest problems I have with this movie are not with its content, but the way the content will be recieved. Moore has created an extremely powerful movie, but will it meet its goal of persuading people to change their minds about Bush or the war against terrorism? I really don't think so, and I'll explain why.
The crowd at the theater had already made up their minds about Bush. The movies main points - Bush was elected unfairly, Bush is an idiot who didn't know what to do for seven minutes after the second plane hit the tower, Bush diverted attention to creating a war against Iraq as soon as possible, and that he lied to the American people - were all applauded loudly by the crowd inside. Moore used an extreme amount of artistic licence and left out many facts to make his point, and the audience lapped up his viewpoint without question. This was not an audience that needed any additional persuading not to vote for Bush. Perhaps conservatives are seeing the movie in other theaters or waiting until the lines die down. But I didn't see them or hear any of them at the showing I attended.
The thing is, people who are still on the fence about who to vote for this November are likely to be those who need to understand both sides of the story. This movie deliberately sidesteps anything that could be used to question its points of view. Anyone who needs to see a different viewpoint about the things in Moore's movie will have to look elsewhere. When they do, it will become immediately apparent how Moore deliberately avoided lots of obvious things to make the points he did.
For instance, the movie states that with any possible recount, Gore would have been re-elected. That's a rather narrow viewpoint, because with both the recount the Supreme Court stopped and with the recount Gore wanted, Gore still would have lost. What Moore meant, but didn't say was that with any possible statewide recount with a certain arbitrary standard applied uniformly, Gore would have come out ahead. But we are made to believe that the Supreme Court stopped a process that would have resulted in a Gore presidency. Not true.
Richard Clarke appears in this movie where he states the Bush administration too quickly focused on Iraq, which weakened our war with Al-Qaeda. The movie also makes you believe that Bush was behind getting the Bin Laden's family out of the U.S. before the general ban on flight was lifted. What it doesn't say is that the flights didn't begin until the ban was lifted - and the authorization to get the Bin Ladens out of the country was made by Clarke himself.
Anyone wanting to dig a little will have no problem finding out that Moore was against taking action against Afghanistan when we did. But one of this movie's main points was that we didn't go after Osama hard enough and fast enough.
Moore portrays Iraq before we bombed it as an idyllic place, with children playing in the streets and happy citizens going about their business. This at the very least ignores the basic facts about Sadaam's murderous regime. For someone who really wanted to examine the facts, they could easily find out that more people were killed and maimed each year under Sadaam's regime than under the occupation. But this is opposite of the impression we get from this movie.
That's not to say this movie didn't score any points with this skeptical viewer. The scene of the contractors convention designed to teach people how to profit from the war turned my stomach. Watching the blank stare on Bush's face after he was told about the second plane made me seriously wonder about his competence. And I hadn't realized the extent the
After using SpamAssassin for quite a while, it just wasn't cutting it - 75%-80% accuracy is still a lot of spam to go through and delete. I added DSpam to my mail server and my spam catching rate is now better than 99%.
DSpam also came with much better directions for integrating with Exim than did SpamAssassin. As fond as I was of SpamAssassin, they have some catching up to do.
jeez...where are some of you people going to school anyway? I'm finishing up my junior year at UNM and already I have done the following:
taken standard algorithms out of CLR and improved upon them, then wrote extensive papers on how much these were improved(quicksort, skiplists) over the published algorithms.
written a logo(you know, turtle graphics) interpreter in Scheme. A fricken 2000-line interpreter in Scheme.
written malloc(as one of many examples) in assembly language.
wrote a hash table class that fully implements the java.util.Map interface and then used it as part of my own custom spam filtering program - the spec also made it so it would work on any UNIX system with procmail.
This is but a subset of what I've had to do, and I'm not even in my senior year yet! I don't go to Carnegie Mellon or MIT either, I go to UNM. And yet I constantly read about stories such as yours where people are graduating with CS degrees without having to do much work.
At any rate, take heart - at least some of us will be graduating knowing something about CS.
(of course this may explain why even C students from here get recruited by Microsoft, IBM, HP, et. al.)
I don't know what gave you that idea. It's more like Albuquerque - highest per capita of PhD's of any large city in the nation - don't watch TV.
So, I take it you pay your tech guys 10 dollars an hour and regard them as steaming piles of shit? I wonder what your company would do without its data? If this is the attitude your company holds about its technical staff I have a feeling you will find out sooner or later.
Mind letting us know what Fortune 50 company you work for? I personally would like to short your stock.
and what better way to draw techies to your website, write an article disparaging Open Source so Slashdot will pick it up!
Ahem. If your site doesn't belong at number 1 for relavent searches, then you've tricked Google into returning something it shouldn't have, thereby reducing the value of its search.
Google should then rightfully ban your site.
If you want to be number one for a particular search, then your site had damn well be the best site for that search. The "best site", by definition is the one most people will visit and recommend and the one other sites will link to the most.
If your site is truly the best one that fits the search, it will make it to number one on Google all by itself. Your best bet would be to hire a consultant to help your business become the best in its field, not to hire one that somehow manages to float your crappy site to the top.
Nevermind
Just a clarification...I know you probably know what you meant, but a casual reader may not...this is not a 576 digit number, but a 576 bit number - the value is on the order of 2^576 - a f*'in big number to factor.
Library sales are a major source of a lot of the dealers already on amazon. The books are going to end up there anyway; if the libraries can sell them directly, I say more power to them.
Step 1: Provide MBA's with wizard-based software. MBA decides to save money by developing his own apps.
Step 2: MBA-developed apps within the company start to cause confusion, productivity loss, and overtime due to bad design, spaghetti code, etc.
Step 3: Company decides to hire professional developers to clean up the mess. The cost is greater than it would have been had they paid for the development help in the first place.
Step 4: PROFIT!
And if you could, you wouldn't say things like:
In the real world math, logic and computer science theory don't matter as much as you think they do.
No, a BS in CS will do. I'm not claiming amazing wizardry, either, but it's certainly beyond your grasp or the grasp of anyone who claims a bachelors in CS is a waste of someones time.
In the real world, programs that I write will run orders of magnitude faster than ones that you write. Of course, this may not matter to you, writing simple web or dialog box code that interfaces with a db containing a few thousand items(or less). But my code can scale to processing millions, even billions of items. Can you say that? Of course not, you wouldn't know the difference between an n^2 and a log(n) algorithm if it smacked you in the face.
You may be a code monkey, but I know the difference, and so do my employers and clients.
I've only seen the first Matrix movie, which was awesome. Should I see Reloaded and Revolutions, or no?
Me too! After reading all the bad reviews, I decided I didn't want the sequels to ruin my experience of the first one.
The Star Wars movies had twenty years of space so that the new ones don't spoil the good ones, but with the Matrix series, there is no such buffer.
smells like a reptile, and acts like a reptile, its a reptile. Giving it a pretty name doesn't change the fact its a slimy creature you should never turn your back on.
You're right...lets be realistic...we need this technology, and the kids keep "losing" the ID tags, so whats the next step? Lets implant the ID chips so the children never lose them.
(do I even need to explain the implications of this?)
Me. I have been waiting for HP to make a calculator that has HP's famous tactile buttons like those found on the HP 48(not the rubbery crap they put on their first-gen 49's), RPN, and symbolic calculation that rivals my TI-89.
In fact I had been checking their site daily since I first heard rumors they were building such a calculator, and like a teenage Britney Spears fan, I plan on buying one as soon as my next allowance comes in.