The greedy pirates is much more complicated than that. You have to understand that the pirates are infinitely smart. Each pirate wants to get the most gold and throw the others overboard but they know there is an order, and they know what the others will propose.
Actually, you must start assuming there are only 2 pirates left (1 and 2). If there were only two, well, pirate 2 must give pirate 1 all the gold or he would just be killed. Actually, the problem sort of implies with "bloodthirsty" that pirate 1 would just kill him anyways, but that causes some ambiguity later on, so I am going to assume pirate 2 would offer pirate 1 all the gold and live.
So, lets look at pirate 3. He knows that if his plan is rejected, pirate 2 will get no gold, and pirate 1 will take all the gold. So he will want to give pirate 2 a favorable deal to get him to vote with him. Here is what he should propose: "999 gold to me (pirate 3) and 1 gold to pirate 2 and 0 gold to pirate 1". Pirate 2 will accept it because he will get a gold piece which is more than he'd get if there were only 2 pirates left. (again depending on how you interpret the "bloodthirsty" comment you could even give him zero pieces if he cared about living). You have a majority and all three live.
Lets go to pirate 4. He needs two others to agree with him. Pirate 3 stands to get most of the gold with 3 left, so there isn't much he can do for him. Pirate 1 and 2 stand to get little and no gold, so give pirate 1 just 1 piece of gold and pirate 2 will get 2 pieces of gold. His proposal becomes, "998 pieces for me (pirate 4), 1 piece for pirate 1 and 2 pieces for pirate 2).
Now, pirate 5 actually is in the best situation. He knows that he needs two others to join him and at that stage, and it is pirate 3 and pirate 1 who will lose out if there are only for left. So, his offer, and the correct answer to this problem is:
The offer from pirate 5, Give 998 pieces of gold to pirate 5 Give 2 pieces to pirate 3 Give 1 piece to pirate 1
Sure, but in his post he wasn't using "keitai" in order to refer to only non-PHS cell phones. Thus, I still believe that cell phone was a more appropriate term to use.
Well, telemarketers use a machine to dial a bunch of numbers. Much of the time no one answers, or the line is busy, or they get an answering machine. A computer listens for these cases and will hang up when it encounters one and try the next number. In the meantime, the telemarketers just sit and wait. When someone picks up and says "Hello", the machine connects that line to a telemarketer. That telemarketer may not realize that he was connected, as he could have been sitting and waiting for a while. Usually we get impatient and say "Hello" a second time and then the telemarketer realizes they have been connected and jumps in with their sales pitch.
Now, if you always say "Hello" only once the machine will connect you but the telemarketer often doesn't realize he has a customer. If you sit there and be very quiet you can often hear the telemarketers talking amongst themselves. One of my friends heard a very racey conversation this way.
uh, what is with the gratuituous use of a Japanese word? "Keitai" means "cell phone". It doesn't have any cultural significance. Why not just say "cell phone"? There isn't anything unique about "keitai" which warrants you to use the Japanese word. Now be a good "gaijin" (foreignor) and use "eigo" (english) unless "nihongo" (Japanese) is "hitsuyo" (necessary) to "wakaru" (understand) a concept.
Anyways, recently, the youth of Japan don't work so much. This is becoming a serious problem in Japan. Many youths prefer to get part-time jobs instead of becoming "salaryman" at large Japanese companies. Now it is my turn to use a gratuituos Japanese word -- "furiitaa". It is a relatively new word (from english "free" and german "arbeiter") which refers to these part-time workers. Furiitaa rather get a part-time job in the service industry and spend their money on beer and toys, instead of getting married and starting a family.
Oh, and that walk signal timer we have in American cities too. There is one in Harvard Square.
And I agree, don't use the jet wash toilets. Especially if you are not sitting on them.
I don't think it should count if he didn't. And it sure looks like he didn't.
I could do the same thing. Just take me to the South Pole with a air balloon and I'll make a little circle around it. Heck, I'll do it a dozen times. Technically, I'm crosses all the lines of latitude, so thats "around the world", right?
To me, unless you make a Great Circle, its not really "around the world".
What are you saying? Kevin Mitnick got as much media coverage as Al Capone? If you are going to use examples like that, please make sure they are at least somewhat believable.
Ask the average joe on the street who Kevin Mitnick is. I bet the vast majority will have no idea who you are talking about. On slashdot, yes, *everyone* knows who Kevin Mitnick is. But we are "nerds" - it isn't Slashdot, news for "everybody". Most people don't know how a computer works - they know computer security is important, but figures such as Kevin Mitnick are quickly forgotten if they get media attention at all.
Al Capone, on the other hand was a legendary figure. Movies where made about him. There were 3-hour long television specials excavating his basement. Fifty years after his death, people still talk about him.
Five years from now even slashdot will have forgotten about Kevin Mitnick.
MP3 *is* lame. The technology is quickly becoming dated, and it is unable to keep up with the increasing demand for better audio quality. It was claimed to be "near-CD quality" but anybody with ears will know that that is a pretty generous comment.
Several companies have (closed) audio standards that sound much better than mp3 at lower bit rates. Unfortunately, they are secret or covered by patents.
Ogg Vorbis at 128kbit sounds better than MP3 at 128kbit, in my opinion, but that is debatable. Ogg at 192kbit will sound better than MP3 at *any* bitrate.
Just because many people use MP3s doesn't mean we can't migrate to a new, better standard.
Remember that NTSC was a *hack* to get color TV to fit into the alloted black and white bandwidth. Now that black and white broadcast television is long obsolete, we are desperately in need of a new television standard. HDTV is taking a long time in coming.
The internal combustion engine is easy to engineer but it is horribly inefficient. External combustion engines (such as the Stirling Engine) are way more efficient and I believe we will begin to see them in the future. The Segway people have several working prototypes.
Basically, what makes something a "de-facto" standard is the fact that people use it. If you don't like it, don't use it and convince others to go with your standard. When you are encoding your own audio (from CD) and playing it on your own player, who cares what standard you use. If you want to use Ogg, use it, and let the player manufacturers know you want support for it. For those of you who will cry when MP3 is replaced by something better, deal with it. Go home and listen to your 8 tracks.
Personally, I am going to buy an iPod and investigate porting Ogg Vorbis to it. In the open source world sometimes if you want something you have to write it yourself.
DSL will only go 12,000 feet without a repeater. That is only about 2 1/2 miles! If you aren't that close to your switching office you are in trouble. This is more common than you think. My company is in a densely populated area. We are in a building in a large office park right off of route 128 (famouse high-tech area in Boston). Yet, we are too far away from the switching office to get DSL.
With a tree blocking a point-to-point wireless solution, we were stuck with getting a T1.
I'm not sure about cable, but there are still many rural areas in the US where cable TV is not available so they use satellite TV instead.
One of the problems with these higher-frequency microwave signals is that they are strictly line-of-sight.
They don't reflect of the ground and diffract around mountains the way radio waves do. Like low-frequency microwaves used in wireless ethernet and portable phones they also don't travel through walls very well.
The biggest problem is that the wavelength of microwaves like this are less than half a centimeter - typically only a few millimeters. This is small enough that raindrops, snow, hailstones etc, will get in the way and cause a significant amount of packet loss. I don't know how they intend on getting around this problem.
How about the 8% of white males who are colorblind
on
3D TV For The Masses?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Video game manufacturers have yet to realize how difficult it is for those with even slight red/green colorblindness to tell the difference between saturated yellow and saturated green.
Super Puzzle Fighter is a perfect example.
Web designers are also bad. You know how often I've seen red text in front of a greenish background? Or cyan in front of white?
Even people like me who didn't realize that they had any color defiency until they started using computer and playing video games run into trouble when color is used to convey important information in the digital world.
3D is the same way. There are a sizable percentage of people who are "monocular" and thus are unable to use goggle or lenticular based 3D solutions.
I've seen this... its not that cool...
on
3D TV For The Masses?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I saw 3D lenticular displays exhibiting DDD's work at SIGGRAPH 2001 and SID (Society for Information Displays) 2002.
I was not that impressed. Basically you see a large moving stereogram but the stereo separation is no where near as good as your average ViewMaster. Most of the time it doesn't look 3D at all. And your depth of field is very limited when it is 3D.
I talked to them for a while about how their technology works. Basically, they attempt to interpolate around the edges of objects in the foreground. Sometimes they can't and that limits how close to the viewer an object can appear. For example, imagine a camera moving by a tree only a few feet in front of it and with a complex landscape in the background. Around the edges of the tree there should be new landscape that one eye would see and the other would not. There is no way to recover this image data because in the original film it was blocked by the tree. Thin objects, like wires or poles or window frames are also especially difficult. Most of the time it requires an artist to do some hand tuning of the images.
I don't see what is special about their technique. Even if they do have some novel ideas for getting 3D out of 2D, I don't see how the data would be useful considering how bad 3D lenticular displays look - eg. limited depth of field, incorrect focal length for objects at different depths, very limited viewing angle.
I work for a company that uses TI's DMD technology for things other than projectors (3D displays, actually).
The DMD's used in a small office projector (about $4000), such as the one's made by inFocus, are the same as those used in the large venue projectors that cost upwards of 100 thousand dollars.
What is the difference then? Well, the large projector's typically have 3 DMDs (one for red, green and blue) while the small projectors only use one plus a spinning color wheel.
Also, don't forget the cost of the optics. In small quantities optical components are very expensive but way come down when they get to be commodity items. The complex prism assembly (made by Minolta) that TI uses in large venue projectors uses some fancy color splitting prisms and high quality lenses all in precise alignment which is required to get the images from each DMD color to line up correctly. These parts should get cheaper now that TI is getting out of the business of selling complete projector "engines" (electronics, optics and DMD).
What about the light source? Well, you can get very cheap (a few hundred dollars) high-pressure mecury vapor bulbs from sylvania/OSRAM (check out their web site). At only 150 watts they are more than bright enough for an office setup. For a large venue projector you'll need something bigger, of course, but still relatively cheap.
What is left is the electronics - and while TI currently charges a high premium for their custom DLP electronics they are getting out of the business of manufacturing complete engines (just the DMDs from now on), which means companies like Christy and Barco will take over the electronics and optics. This means more competition and lower prices.
I can tell you that while a large venue projector using a lightning or thunder engine costs over 100k, the engine itself was probably sold by TI to Christy or Barco for less than 25k, and that these days they only cost a couple thousand. The actual cost of the parts is even less. Movie-size large venue projectors probably will always be in the tens of thousands, but that is only because they can be, not because there is some part that necessitates this cost.
This term was not made up by marketing and was not made up yesterday. It refers to a "volumetric pixel" and has been around for more than 50 years! These days it is a very common term used in volumetric imaging. Too often people only talk about polygonal rendering, but visualizing clouds of points is very important in such fields as seismic and medical imaging.
Um, did you look at their web page? It's at www.actuality-systems.com. It actually is in 3D -- the "flat" screen rotates and you see it as a real 3D image that actually occupies a volume.
They are in a "no-need for license" free for all location in the microwave spectrum. This was originally set aside expect only the military to use it but then cordless phones, 802.11b, and bluetooth appeared. They are perfectly legal in this band as long as the broadcasting power is under a certain limit. Since each device doesn't require an independent license, they don't fall under the same FCC laws that radios and other communication devices do.
Slashdot Mirror
My brand-new Sony Vaio laptop crashes frequently
*on bootup* with a blue screen of death.
Its running XP home
Couldn't it just be that the earth is getting fatter?
But the real question is: how would want to 'configure' their toasters using a GUI?"
Yes, how would I want it, indeed.
sorry, change that 998 to 997 :)
The greedy pirates is much more complicated than that. You have to understand that the pirates are infinitely smart. Each pirate wants to get the most gold and throw the others overboard but they know there is an order, and they know what the others will propose.
Actually, you must start assuming there are only 2 pirates left (1 and 2). If there were only two, well, pirate 2 must give pirate 1 all the gold or he would just be killed. Actually, the problem sort of implies with "bloodthirsty" that pirate 1 would just kill him anyways, but that causes some ambiguity later on, so I am going to assume pirate 2 would offer pirate 1 all the gold and live.
So, lets look at pirate 3. He knows that if his plan is rejected, pirate 2 will get no gold, and pirate 1 will take all the gold. So he will want to give pirate 2 a favorable deal to get him to vote with him. Here is what he should propose: "999 gold to me (pirate 3) and 1 gold to pirate 2 and 0 gold to pirate 1". Pirate 2 will accept it because he will get a gold piece which is more than he'd get if there were only 2 pirates left. (again depending on how you interpret the "bloodthirsty" comment you could even give him zero pieces if he cared about living). You have a majority and all three live.
Lets go to pirate 4. He needs two others to agree with him. Pirate 3 stands to get most of the gold with 3 left, so there isn't much he can do for him. Pirate 1 and 2 stand to get little and no gold, so give pirate 1 just 1 piece of gold and pirate 2 will get 2 pieces of gold. His proposal becomes, "998 pieces for me (pirate 4), 1 piece for pirate 1 and 2 pieces for pirate 2).
Now, pirate 5 actually is in the best situation. He knows that he needs two others to join him and at that stage, and it is pirate 3 and pirate 1 who will lose out if there are only for left.
So, his offer, and the correct answer to this problem is:
The offer from pirate 5,
Give 998 pieces of gold to pirate 5
Give 2 pieces to pirate 3
Give 1 piece to pirate 1
They all live and pirate 5 is very happy.
He must have taken spelling lessons from CmdrTaco...
You forgot the green peas in the Tuna Mac recipe.
They are *essential*
Sure, but in his post he wasn't using "keitai" in order to refer to only non-PHS cell phones. Thus, I still believe that cell phone was a more appropriate term to use.
Well, telemarketers use a machine to dial a bunch of numbers. Much of the time no one answers, or the line is busy, or they get an answering machine. A computer listens for these cases and will hang up when it encounters one and try the next number. In the meantime, the telemarketers just sit and wait. When someone picks up and says "Hello", the machine connects that line to a telemarketer. That telemarketer may not realize that he was connected, as he could have been sitting and waiting for a while. Usually we get impatient and say "Hello" a second time and then the telemarketer realizes they have been connected and jumps in with their sales pitch.
Now, if you always say "Hello" only once the machine will connect you but the telemarketer often doesn't realize he has a customer. If you sit there and be very quiet you can often hear the telemarketers talking amongst themselves. One of my friends heard a very racey conversation this way.
Thus, the free phone sex.
uh, what is with the gratuituous use of a Japanese word? "Keitai" means "cell phone". It doesn't have any cultural significance. Why not just say "cell phone"? There isn't anything unique about "keitai" which warrants you to use the Japanese word. Now be a good "gaijin" (foreignor) and use "eigo" (english) unless "nihongo" (Japanese) is "hitsuyo" (necessary) to "wakaru" (understand) a concept.
Anyways, recently, the youth of Japan don't work so much. This is becoming a serious problem in Japan. Many youths prefer to get part-time jobs instead of becoming "salaryman" at large Japanese companies. Now it is my turn to use a gratuituos Japanese word -- "furiitaa". It is a relatively new word (from english "free" and german "arbeiter") which refers to these part-time workers. Furiitaa rather get a part-time job in the service industry and spend their money on beer and toys, instead of getting married and starting a family.
Oh, and that walk signal timer we have in American cities too. There is one in Harvard Square.
And I agree, don't use the jet wash toilets. Especially if you are not sitting on them.
I'm not sure about US, but I'm using a cell phone talking to my friends while looking at his face. This little cute thing cost me about...US$576.
huh?
I don't understand... if you are close enough to see his face, why do you need a cell phone to talk to him??
um, no, how do you play DVDs in Linux?
I don't think it should count if he didn't. And it sure looks like he didn't.
I could do the same thing. Just take me to the South Pole with a air balloon and I'll make a little circle around it. Heck, I'll do it a dozen times. Technically, I'm crosses all the lines of latitude, so thats "around the world", right?
To me, unless you make a Great Circle, its not really "around the world".
What are you saying?
Kevin Mitnick got as much media coverage as Al Capone?
If you are going to use examples like that, please make sure they are at least somewhat believable.
Ask the average joe on the street who Kevin Mitnick is. I bet the vast majority will have no idea who you are talking about. On slashdot, yes, *everyone* knows who Kevin Mitnick is. But we are "nerds" - it isn't Slashdot, news for "everybody". Most people don't know how a computer works - they know computer security is important, but figures such as Kevin Mitnick are quickly forgotten if they get media attention at all.
Al Capone, on the other hand was a legendary figure. Movies where made about him. There were 3-hour long television specials excavating his basement. Fifty years after his death, people still talk about him.
Five years from now even slashdot will have forgotten about Kevin Mitnick.
It insane to compare the two.
MP3 *is* lame. The technology is quickly becoming dated, and it is unable to keep up with the increasing demand for better audio quality. It was claimed to be "near-CD quality" but anybody with ears will know that that is a pretty generous comment.
Several companies have (closed) audio standards that sound much better than mp3 at lower bit rates. Unfortunately, they are secret or covered by patents.
Ogg Vorbis at 128kbit sounds better than MP3 at 128kbit, in my opinion, but that is debatable.
Ogg at 192kbit will sound better than MP3 at *any* bitrate.
Just because many people use MP3s doesn't mean we can't migrate to a new, better standard.
Remember that NTSC was a *hack* to get color TV to fit into the alloted black and white bandwidth. Now that black and white broadcast television is long obsolete, we are desperately in need of a new television standard. HDTV is taking a long time in coming.
The internal combustion engine is easy to engineer but it is horribly inefficient. External combustion engines (such as the Stirling Engine) are way more efficient and I believe we will begin to see them in the future. The Segway people have several working prototypes.
Basically, what makes something a "de-facto" standard is the fact that people use it. If you don't like it, don't use it and convince others to go with your standard. When you are encoding your own audio (from CD) and playing it on your own player, who cares what standard you use. If you want to use Ogg, use it, and let the player manufacturers know you want support for it. For those of you who will cry when MP3 is replaced by something better, deal with it. Go home and listen to your 8 tracks.
Personally, I am going to buy an iPod and investigate porting Ogg Vorbis to it. In the open source world sometimes if you want something you have to write it yourself.
DSL will only go 12,000 feet without a repeater. That is only about 2 1/2 miles! If you aren't that close to your switching office you are in trouble. This is more common than you think. My company is in a densely populated area. We are in a building in a large office park right off of route 128 (famouse high-tech area in Boston). Yet, we are too far away from the switching office to get DSL.
With a tree blocking a point-to-point wireless solution, we were stuck with getting a T1.
I'm not sure about cable, but there are still many rural areas in the US where cable TV is not available so they use satellite TV instead.
One of the problems with these higher-frequency microwave signals is that they are strictly line-of-sight.
They don't reflect of the ground and diffract around mountains the way radio waves do. Like
low-frequency microwaves used in wireless ethernet and portable phones they also don't travel through walls very well.
The biggest problem is that the wavelength of microwaves like this are less than half a centimeter - typically only a few millimeters.
This is small enough that raindrops, snow, hailstones etc, will get in the way and cause a significant amount of packet loss. I don't know how they intend on getting around this problem.
Video game manufacturers have yet to realize how difficult it is for those with even slight red/green colorblindness to tell the difference between saturated yellow and saturated green. Super Puzzle Fighter is a perfect example.
Web designers are also bad. You know how often I've seen red text in front of a greenish background? Or cyan in front of white?
Even people like me who didn't realize that they had any color defiency until they started using computer and playing video games run into trouble when color is used to convey important information in the digital world.
3D is the same way. There are a sizable percentage of people who are "monocular" and thus are unable to use goggle or lenticular based 3D solutions.
Thats why we should all use:
www.actuality-systems.com
I saw 3D lenticular displays exhibiting DDD's work at SIGGRAPH 2001 and SID (Society for Information Displays) 2002.
I was not that impressed. Basically you see a large moving stereogram but the stereo separation is no where near as good as your average ViewMaster. Most of the time it doesn't look 3D at all. And your depth of field is very limited when it is 3D.
I talked to them for a while about how their technology works. Basically, they attempt to interpolate around the edges of objects in the foreground. Sometimes they can't and that limits how close to the viewer an object can appear. For example, imagine a camera moving by a tree only a few feet in front of it and with a complex landscape in the background. Around the edges of the tree there should be new landscape that one eye would see and the other would not. There is no way to recover this image data because in the original film it was blocked by the tree. Thin objects, like wires or poles or window frames are also especially difficult. Most of the time it requires an artist to do some hand tuning of the images.
I don't see what is special about their technique. Even if they do have some novel ideas for getting 3D out of 2D, I don't see how the data would be useful considering how bad 3D lenticular displays look - eg. limited depth of field, incorrect focal length for objects at different depths, very limited viewing angle.
I work for a company that uses TI's DMD technology for things other than projectors (3D displays, actually).
The DMD's used in a small office projector (about $4000), such as the one's made by inFocus, are the same as those used in the large venue projectors that cost upwards of 100 thousand dollars.
What is the difference then? Well, the large projector's typically have 3 DMDs (one for red, green and blue) while the small projectors only use one plus a spinning color wheel.
Also, don't forget the cost of the optics. In small quantities optical components are very expensive but way come down when they get to be commodity items. The complex prism assembly (made by Minolta) that TI uses in large venue projectors uses some fancy color splitting prisms and high quality lenses all in precise alignment which is required to get the images from each DMD color to line up correctly. These parts should get cheaper now that TI is getting out of the business of selling complete projector "engines" (electronics, optics and DMD).
What about the light source? Well, you can get very cheap (a few hundred dollars) high-pressure
mecury vapor bulbs from sylvania/OSRAM (check out their web site). At only 150 watts they are more than bright enough for an office setup. For a large venue projector you'll need something bigger, of course, but still relatively cheap.
What is left is the electronics - and while TI currently charges a high premium for their custom DLP electronics they are getting out of the business of manufacturing complete engines (just the DMDs from now on), which means companies like Christy and Barco will take over the electronics and optics. This means more competition and lower prices.
I can tell you that while a large venue projector using a lightning or thunder engine costs over 100k, the engine itself was probably sold by TI to Christy or Barco for less than 25k, and that these days they only cost a couple thousand. The actual cost of the parts is even less. Movie-size large venue projectors probably will always be in the tens of thousands, but that is only because they can be, not because there is some part that necessitates this cost.
This term was not made up by marketing and was not made up yesterday. It refers to a "volumetric pixel" and has been around for more than 50 years!
These days it is a very common term used in volumetric imaging. Too often people only talk about polygonal rendering, but visualizing clouds of points is very important in such fields as seismic and medical imaging.
Actually, it isn't a cube of 464*464*464...
Its a sphere with a radius of 768 pixels and
198 slices.
That means it is about 768*768*198.
Um, did you look at their web page?
It's at www.actuality-systems.com. It actually is
in 3D -- the "flat" screen rotates and you see
it as a real 3D image that actually occupies a volume.
They are in a "no-need for license" free for
all location in the microwave spectrum. This was originally set aside expect only the military to use it but then cordless phones, 802.11b, and bluetooth appeared. They are perfectly legal in this band as long as the broadcasting power is under a certain limit. Since each device doesn't require an independent license, they don't fall under the same FCC laws that radios and other communication devices do.
couldn't they have at least make it *correct*.
The Lanthanoids should be inserted between 56 and 71 and the Actinoids between 88 and 103 and the two pieces should be shifted over.
This would then correctly repesent the way the electron orbitals are filled as predicted by the wave equation.