There are several annoying things about 3D glasses. I'll assume you are talking about 3D goggles with video monitors inside of them. The polarized or color-based "passive" 3D glasses are not considered to be good enough for people who wish to do work in 3D. Here we go:
- 3D goggles are only usable by one person at a time. To have multiple people view the same image at the same time you need multiple sets of goggles and multiple computers or one *really fast* computer.
- You need some type of head-tracking mechanism to track where the user is looking. This is not trivial and introduces some annoying lag into the display
- Goggles tend to give people headaches after only minutes of use. Some people get nauseous. This is due to the following reasons.
- The lag in the update of the display introduces some temporal discrepancies that confuses your brain.
- The images are all *in focus* regardless of the depth. This is not true in real life. Your depth of focus is not infinite. Notice if you stare at an object close to you, the objects far from you will be blurry. When you use 3D goggles your eyes expect objects at different depths to be at different "focal planes". Instead they are all imaged onto a single plane.
- In a real 3D world your eyes also adjust "in and out" (cross-eyed vs. wall-eyed) to assure that both eyes are "pointing" at the same depth. Since goggles produce an image on a single plane this confuses the eyes when viewing images at different depths.
- The update rate on goggles is typically less than the minimum of 60Hz we are used to seeing on modern monitors.
- Goggles are expensive, heavy, and need a cable to connect them to a computer. Switching back and forth between goggles and a computer screen is difficult.
There were many companies at SIGGRAPH with lenticular displays (ribbed lenses that give you different views when you move your head around).
Members of my company actually saw this particular display at SID last year (Society for Information Displays). They were not impressed.
This display works in a similar way to the lenticular displays, except the 3-D image is
produced in a slightly different way. It has multiple - 2, in this case - LCD panels instead of
a lens directing the light output in different directions.
There are several downsides to this technology:
- It only looks 3D if you are looking
at it straight on and standing a certain distance from the display. This makes it difficult for several people to look at at a time.
- There is typically a very limited number of available "depths". This is because you are only showing 2 images at a time.
- In the case of this display you need a video card that has a dual monitor output and special software to take advantage of the display.
- Most lenticular displays have to trade off number of views with horizontal resolution. Thus, their resolution is usually rather poor compared to present day monitors.
The image is sort of like watching a 3-D movie - you know with the red/blue glasses. It sort of looks cool and is 3-D but probably not really useful for anything.
Also, the comment on their web page:
"The world's first commercially available mult-dimensional monitors."
is total bull.
There are *many* companies selling this technology.
Actuality Systems
is one.
DMA is another that uses a similar system except with many layers of LCDs. In fact they have a patent on this technology. I wonder how ActualDepth will get away with it.
Just do a web search. You'll come up with a dozen companies selling flat-screen "3D"
I agree with this. I work with three graduates of MIT and they are some of the most talented software engineers I've ever met. At first, I was shocked to learn that the *ONLY* language ever taught to MIT CS students is Scheme (a dialect of LISP for those who don't know what it is). Oh, and thats taught in the _intro_ Computer Science class. Once they know the "basics" they are expected to learn all the other necessary languages they'll need by themselves (C, C++, Java etc.).
At Harvard, where I got my CS degree, we learned C++ (an imperative language) and LISP (a functional language). Everything else was theory. MIT just gets straight to the point and only teaches the functional language, because that is *pure* CS. After thinking about it, I realized that this was the way to go. You can teach someone how to use some piece of technology which may be obsolete soon, or you can teach them how to think.
For people who are really majoring in Computer Science, it shouldn't be about "programming languages" but Computer Science - that is computability, algorithms, data structures, operating systems, electronics, E&M physics, math, foundations of networks, graphics, compilers, databases, cryptography etc. Any decent CS major will pick up the rest himself. Damn, I should have gone to MIT...
Large-venue DLP projectors don't use a color wheel. Instead, they use 3 separate red, green and blue DMDs (digital mirror devices) that are mixed with color-filtered prisms
No, They are the same thing in most cases involving DSL and cable.
Just like you can't drive two cars on the freeway at the same time you can't connect two DSL modems up to one line. With cable, if you connected 2 modems, you see that you have half the bandwidth with each one.
At home, I have cable. I am told that I get a max of 1.5 megabits/second downstream. Upstream its around 384kbit/second. Of course, this assumes no one else in my neighborhood is using it at the same time. They don't promise that all this bandwidth is for me, but they tell me that the line is capable of that. It means little in real life, because it all depends on how many people it is shared with.
At work, with DSL, its even simpler to understand. We have a 768kbits/sec connection in both directions. This is all our own and they have a guarentee that we will be able to transfer data continously at that rate -- at least until we get to their servers.
I don't understand by what you mean by "speed".
You seem to be defining it as the total possible bandwidth of the line. This is what cable companies are selling because their bandwidth is "shared", but its not the right term to use for this bandwidth.
The latency and propagation delay of signal traveling over DSL is the only thing that makes sense as "speed" to me. That would be measured as round-trip time to a server somewhere. This isn't important to the internet user because most of this latency comes from how far your signals have to travel before they reach their destination (usually the speed of light or close to it) and not how much bandwidth your connection has. Thus, I can experience really high latency when telnetting to Japan, but be able to FTP files there in a snap. That is the difference between "bandwidth" and "speed"
I've had a cable modem since 1998 back when I don't think anyone had heard of "NAT" and wireless ethernet for the home didn't even exist. My roommates and I were one of the early customers of MediaOne, back before they merged with Road Runner and before they were bought by AT&T. We paid 40 bucks a month for our connection and, like most other cable services, our bandwidth was decent but it was shared with those who live in the same neighborhood as you. Now, between myself and my 2 roommates we had 10 computers between us.
There weren't any NAT boxes available, so we did it the old fashioned way - we used a 486 put together from spare parts running Linux with IP Masquerading installed. ("IP Masquerading" is what NAT was called back then.) All of our computers were hooked up to this box - and MediaOne only saw one computer on their network. Our setup worked well and we didn't feel like we were stealing - in fact we believed were helping relieve the growing shortage of IP addresses.
If cable and DSL providers want to restrict the number of computers connected to a single modem, they need to be more clear about what they are selling. Are they selling IP addresses? If so, I only want one IP address, thank you. Are they selling bandwidth? Well, if they are, give me a monthly bandwidth cap because despite the fact we have nearly a dozen computers we didn't use anywhere near as much bandwidth as the kid next door with one computer who downloaded pr0n 24-hours a day.
And finally, if they are charging for just having the connection itself then don't complain about how many computers are connected. Does the phone company care how many phones are connected to a single line? You may argue that a single phone line will only let you have one call going at one time. Well, the same is true of cable and DSL services. Anyway you look at it, there is only one packet being transmitted through the DSL or cable modem at any given time. This is very different from stealing cable television where you can watch multiple channels at the same time on different TVs.
Given all of this, the only thing that the cable and DSL providers can do is limit the bandwidth on a connection. If they did that then "Bob" wouldn't be as willing to share his bandwidth with his neighbors because it would either mean additional fees or slower access for himself. He should have the right to "timeshare" his connection anyway he wants. Just like if I were let my neighbors watch my cable TV while I'm not home or if I deleted my copy of Quake and lent the CD to a friend.
Besides, even if something like CAT is implemented, clever Linux users will still be able to customize their own little firewall/router to bypass this and this "problem" will still exist.
I bought a Japanese PS2 when I was in Japan last spring. I bought it because I prefer to play games that involve voices, (like Final Fantasy X) in Japanese. It's sort of the same reason why I, like many others, prefer subtitled over dubbed anime.
In addition, there are several games that are never will be released in America. True Love Story 3 is a perfect example. The fabulous Tokimeki Memorial series on the PS1 are other games that will never be released here. These games would never sell in America, but I enjoy playing them.
Also, I was able to play Gran Turismo 3 several months before I could have in America.
So now, I have this Japanese PS2 and despite my best efforts, I had yet to find a way to play American games! I still can't play Metal Gear Solid 2 and I've been wanting to play SSX Tricky for a long time. I have no desire to pirate games - just be able to purchase both imports and American games and play them on my PS2. I know this is possible, but SONY is making it quite difficult for us!
I don't care about what British copyright law says, but American copyright law has "fair use" built into it which gives me some rights over what I can do with copyrighted material I've purchased. This includes making back-up copies for myself, or playing a game on a foreign or even custom-made playstation.
I'm still searching for a way to play American games on my PS2. I have a little box that plugs in to the USB port that lets me play American PS1 games on it, but I haven't been able to get American PS2 games to work. I thought a "game shark" might help, but it turns out that those too, are region coded. Anyone have any ideas?
From the perspective of theorectical computer science this means nothing. NP problems are measured by the speed they run on DETERMINISTIC *turing machines* which means traditional computers and the like. Remember that NP problems can be solved by nondeterministic turing machines in polynomial time. No one cares how long it takes on a quantum computer, because they aren't deterministic turing machines.
And if one NP-complete problem were found to have a polynomial time solution on a deterministic turing machine we could reduce all the other NP-complete problems to this problem in polynomial time and solve them just as fast. This is how one goes about showing a problem is NP-complete
I can't comment on the math in the second half of your posting but your definition of NP-complete is wrong on many levels.
First of all, it isn't known whether NP is equal to P or not, so its nto safe to say that there is no O(n^k) solution to those problems. This is minor because it is widely believed that P!=NP.
Second, NP is a superset of P. That means all the problems in P are also in NP!
Third, your definition is wrong. NP is the group of problems that can be solved by a nondeterministic turing machine in polynomial time. If you don't know what this means, there are several good books out there. Come back to this post when you have read them.
Fourth, it hasn't been shown that there are ANY problems in NP, but not in P, but aren't NP-complete! That means all the so-called NP (excluding P here) problems we know of are NP-complete! Now they may be some that lie "between NP-complete and P but no one has found one yet. Or proven that a problem we know of lives in this set.
Lastly, there are harder problems than NP-complete problems. See PSPACE and EXPTIME.
first of all, dividing an NP-complete problem up into a finite number of parts, like the "parallel" pizza delivers does not make it easier. It is still NP-complete.
second, O(google) is it is the same as O(1) because "google" is a constant.
third, "google" is spelled googol when it refers to the number, but I admit thats just nitpicking
slash (n.) antedating 1988, (sense is fan fiction
about a pairing of fictional characters)
I will die laughing the day I see this in the dictionary.
btw, for those who don't know when they mean when they say "pairing" they mean male/male or female/female pairings. In practice though they mean male/male pairings. I've never heard of a f/f pairing called slash.
I've been playing the Japanese version of FFX for the past few months (though I haven't beaten it yet). I must admit it is a *very* visually appealing game. The character's are also more likable than, say Squall of FF8. It also has an interesting new level advancement system where you get points which allow you to move your characters around a large map - different locations means getting different abilities. Its kind of hard to describe but it works really well, and it is easier to use than say, junctioning, and makes more sense than materia.
The voice acting in the Japanese version is *amazing* and I hope they got American actors that are up to par. I would have prefered that the American version of this game have just been subtitled in English, but I understand most wouldn't like that.
The only downside, and this is sort of major for me, is that the game is *extremely* linear in nature. The story is great but it doesn't give you much chance to explore outside the rigid framework they give you. I've noticed there's been less and less freedom in FF games recently.
Lastly, I must say the underwater polo game is awesome!
Look, it says that they are one thousandth the size, but with one millionth the power output of
a large turbine in a power station. That means they are one thousand time LESS EFFICIENT.
This isn't efficient. Didn't you read the article???
Its one-thousandth the size but one-millionth
the power output of a power station.
They didn't create this for *efficiency*.
It was made because its small and portable.
Re:Taking money from MS
on
XBox Released
·
· Score: 1
This won't work...
If we all go out and buy Xboxes, MS will be
able to go to game developers and say "look
how many units we've sold! Don't you want to
be able to develop for such a large audience?"
MS will end up with more developers licensing to
develop for the Xbox and MS will make money. Its the game developers that lose out when then don't
sell any games.
We aren't talking about disks though. We are talking FILE SIZES.
Disk manufacturers somehow get away with a pretty
controversial marketing scam. Everyone else in
the computer world uses the power of two method.
Including people who sell computer memory.
1024 bytes = 1 kilobyte
1024*1024 = 1 megabyte
1024*1024*1024 = 1 gigabyte
1024*1024*1024*1024 = 1 terabyte
1 petabyte is 2^50 bytes or:
1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes!
so 144 petabytes would be...
162,129,586,585,337,856 bytes
not
144,000,000,000,000,000 bytes
or 144115188075855872 bytes (2^48 *512)
I don't know where they get 2^48 * 512?
if it really is 2^48 * 512, well, I'm sorry but
that is only 128 petabytes!
In Microsoft eyes, any box not running Windows is a sale that they've lost. They are very serious about dominating the home market, the business market, the server market, ok, well, they leave the minis and mainframes for IBM.
So a web server running Linux is a loss for Microsoft's IIS. Just because Microsoft didn't have much share of that market in the past, it doesn't mean they don't expect to in the future.
For example, when Netscape first started Microsoft didn't have any precense in the "internet realm". Now we talk
about how IE dominates the browser world.
When you take this into account, you realize how pointless that article is...
After seeing what they had at SIGGRAPH last year, I can't wait to see what they have this year!
(It said it would be cool in the article - look at the last line).
The GSCube demo last year really was awesome.
um... According to the article it was 1 to 2 meters across and 30 metric tons.
That sounds car-sized to me.
AT&T Digital Cable is *horrible*
on
The Joys of HDTV
·
· Score: 1
I used to have Mediaone Cable. Since 1998 they provided us with a wonderful service. Every time you switched the channel a simple "white text on black background" text box popped up showing you what was on, when it started and ended, and a brief description of the show. The TV guide acessable through the set-top box was also simple, and easy to use. Sure, it looked a little retro, but all the features were there and quick to access. With the limited resolution of todays TVs, simple text and lines is the best way to present information. The set-top box was small and fit on top of our TV. We also saved $10 off our cable modem because we got cable from MediaOne. A bunch of mergers and acquisitions happened but our service stayed the same.
A few months ago, AT&T enticed us to sign up for their digital cable service by offering a reduced rate on our phone - the phone and cable would be one package which would be the same price as our cable alone now. They installed "digital cable" which included a set-top box wider than our (large) TV. Now we have pretty little menus. But they are so slow! It seems like it takes seconds to change the channel because it needs to "decode" the image. The menu boxes are larger and have less information in them. You need to hit an "info" button which takes you to an alternate screen in order to find out anything about what is on. That takes time, because it has to draw all those graphics and ads. Also, the bottom of the screen is filled up with advertisements whenever you switch channels! The picture quality has also suffered and there doesn't seem to be an easy way to change channels if you don't have the remote. To put it bluntly - it sucks!
And to top it all off it is actually more expensive because our phone bill has yet to be integrated into our cable bill. I would go back to the old system in a second, but I don't think they will let us.
Slashdot Mirror
I think real *volumetric* 3-D is the way to go.
Multiple can view the image at the same time and the image actually occupies a real volume.
Too many technologies just seem to be *faking* 3D
and only provide horizontal parallex with a limited number of views.
IMHO, this technology is really cool!
There are several annoying things about 3D glasses. I'll assume you are talking about 3D goggles with video monitors inside of them.
The polarized or color-based "passive" 3D glasses are not considered to be good enough for people who wish to do work in 3D.
Here we go:
- 3D goggles are only usable by one person at a time. To have multiple people view the same image at the same time you need multiple sets of goggles and multiple computers or one *really fast* computer.
- You need some type of head-tracking mechanism to track where the user is looking. This is not trivial and introduces some annoying lag into the display
- Goggles tend to give people headaches after only minutes of use. Some people get nauseous. This is due to the following reasons.
- The lag in the update of the display introduces some temporal discrepancies that confuses your brain.
- The images are all *in focus* regardless of the depth. This is not true in real life. Your depth of focus is not infinite. Notice if you stare at an object close to you, the objects far from you will be blurry. When you use 3D goggles your eyes expect objects at different depths to be at different "focal planes". Instead they are all imaged onto a single plane.
- In a real 3D world your eyes also adjust "in and out" (cross-eyed vs. wall-eyed) to assure that both eyes are "pointing" at the same depth. Since goggles produce an image on a single plane this confuses the eyes when viewing images at different depths.
- The update rate on goggles is typically less than the minimum of 60Hz we are used to seeing on modern monitors.
- Goggles are expensive, heavy, and need a cable to connect them to a computer. Switching back and forth between goggles and a computer screen is difficult.
Check out Actuality Systems
They support Linux!
Dimensional Media Associates (DMA) also has a patent on layer LCD screens to form a 3-D image: DMA Patent
Half of DMA are also lawyers. I smell a lawsuit.
There were many companies at SIGGRAPH with lenticular displays (ribbed lenses that give you different views when you move your head around). Members of my company actually saw this particular display at SID last year (Society for Information Displays). They were not impressed. This display works in a similar way to the lenticular displays, except the 3-D image is produced in a slightly different way. It has multiple - 2, in this case - LCD panels instead of a lens directing the light output in different directions.
There are several downsides to this technology:
- It only looks 3D if you are looking at it straight on and standing a certain distance from the display. This makes it difficult for several people to look at at a time.
- There is typically a very limited number of available "depths". This is because you are only showing 2 images at a time.
- In the case of this display you need a video card that has a dual monitor output and special software to take advantage of the display.
- Most lenticular displays have to trade off number of views with horizontal resolution. Thus, their resolution is usually rather poor compared to present day monitors.
The image is sort of like watching a 3-D movie - you know with the red/blue glasses. It sort of looks cool and is 3-D but probably not really useful for anything.
Also, the comment on their web page: "The world's first commercially available mult-dimensional monitors." is total bull.
There are *many* companies selling this technology.
Actuality Systems is one.
DMA is another that uses a similar system except with many layers of LCDs. In fact they have a patent on this technology. I wonder how ActualDepth will get away with it.
Just do a web search. You'll come up with a dozen companies selling flat-screen "3D"
I agree with this. I work with three graduates of MIT and they are some of the most talented software engineers I've ever met. At first, I was shocked to learn that the *ONLY* language ever taught to MIT CS students is Scheme (a dialect of LISP for those who don't know what it is). Oh, and thats taught in the _intro_ Computer Science class. Once they know the
"basics" they are expected to learn all the other necessary languages they'll need by themselves (C, C++, Java etc.).
At Harvard, where I got my CS degree, we learned C++ (an imperative language) and LISP (a functional language). Everything else was theory.
MIT just gets straight to the point and only teaches the functional language, because that is *pure* CS. After thinking about it, I realized that this was the way to go. You can teach someone how to use some piece of technology which may be obsolete soon, or you can teach them how to think.
For people who are really majoring in Computer Science, it shouldn't be about "programming languages" but Computer Science - that is computability, algorithms, data structures, operating systems, electronics, E&M physics, math,
foundations of networks, graphics, compilers, databases, cryptography etc. Any decent CS major will pick up the rest himself.
Damn, I should have gone to MIT...
Large-venue DLP projectors don't use a color wheel. Instead, they use 3 separate red, green and blue DMDs (digital mirror devices) that are mixed with color-filtered prisms
No, They are the same thing in most cases involving DSL and cable.
Just like you can't drive two cars on the freeway at the same time you can't connect two DSL modems up to one line. With cable, if you connected 2 modems, you see that you have half the bandwidth with each one.
At home, I have cable. I am told that I get a max of 1.5 megabits/second downstream. Upstream its around 384kbit/second. Of course, this assumes no one else in my neighborhood is using it at the same time. They don't promise that all this bandwidth is for me, but they tell me that the line is capable of that. It means little in real life, because it all depends on how many people it is shared with.
At work, with DSL, its even simpler to understand. We have a 768kbits/sec connection in both directions. This is all our own and they have a guarentee that we will be able to transfer data continously at that rate -- at least until we get to their servers.
I don't understand by what you mean by "speed".
You seem to be defining it as the total possible bandwidth of the line. This is what cable companies are selling because their bandwidth is "shared", but its not the right term to use for this bandwidth.
The latency and propagation delay of signal traveling over DSL is the only thing that makes sense as "speed" to me. That would be measured as round-trip time to a server somewhere. This isn't important to the internet user because most of this latency comes from how far your signals have to travel before they reach their destination (usually the speed of light or close to it) and not how much bandwidth your connection has. Thus, I can experience really high latency when telnetting to Japan, but be able to FTP files there in a snap. That is the difference between "bandwidth" and "speed"
I've had a cable modem since 1998 back when I don't think anyone had heard of "NAT" and wireless ethernet for the home didn't even exist. My roommates and I were one of the early customers of MediaOne, back before they merged with Road Runner and before they were bought by AT&T. We paid 40 bucks a month for our connection and, like most other cable services, our bandwidth was decent but it was shared with those who live in the same neighborhood as you. Now, between myself and my 2 roommates we had 10 computers between us.
There weren't any NAT boxes available, so we did it the old fashioned way - we used a 486 put together from spare parts running Linux with IP Masquerading installed. ("IP Masquerading" is what NAT was called back then.) All of our computers were hooked up to this box - and MediaOne only saw one computer on their network. Our setup worked well and we didn't feel like we were stealing - in fact we believed were helping relieve the growing shortage of IP addresses.
If cable and DSL providers want to restrict the number of computers connected to a single modem, they need to be more clear about what they are selling. Are they selling IP addresses? If so, I only want one IP address, thank you. Are they selling bandwidth? Well, if they are, give me a monthly bandwidth cap because despite the fact we have nearly a dozen computers we didn't use anywhere near as much bandwidth as the kid next door with one computer who downloaded pr0n 24-hours a day.
And finally, if they are charging for just having the connection itself then don't complain about how many computers are connected. Does the phone company care how many phones are connected to a single line? You may argue that a single phone line will only let you have one call going at one time. Well, the same is true of cable and DSL services. Anyway you look at it, there is only one packet being transmitted through the DSL or cable modem at any given time. This is very different from stealing cable television where you can watch multiple channels at the same time on different TVs.
Given all of this, the only thing that the cable and DSL providers can do is limit the bandwidth on a connection. If they did that then "Bob" wouldn't be as willing to share his bandwidth with his neighbors because it would either mean additional fees or slower access for himself. He should have the right to "timeshare" his connection anyway he wants. Just like if I were let my neighbors watch my cable TV while I'm not home or if I deleted my copy of Quake and lent the CD to a friend.
Besides, even if something like CAT is implemented, clever Linux users will still be able to customize their own little firewall/router to bypass this and this "problem" will still exist.
I bought a Japanese PS2 when I was in Japan last spring. I bought it because I prefer to play games that involve voices, (like Final Fantasy X) in Japanese. It's sort of the same reason why I, like many others, prefer subtitled over dubbed anime.
In addition, there are several games that are never will be released in America. True Love Story 3 is a perfect example. The fabulous Tokimeki Memorial series on the PS1 are other games that will never be released here. These games would never sell in America, but I enjoy playing them.
Also, I was able to play Gran Turismo 3 several months before I could have in America.
So now, I have this Japanese PS2 and despite my best efforts, I had yet to find a way to play American games! I still can't play Metal Gear Solid 2 and I've been wanting to play SSX Tricky for a long time. I have no desire to pirate games - just be able to purchase both imports and American games and play them on my PS2. I know this is possible, but SONY is making it quite difficult for us!
I don't care about what British copyright law says, but American copyright law has "fair use" built into it which gives me some rights over what I can do with copyrighted material I've purchased. This includes making back-up copies for myself, or playing a game on a foreign or even custom-made playstation.
I'm still searching for a way to play American games on my PS2. I have a little box that plugs in to the USB port that lets me play American PS1 games on it, but I haven't been able to get American PS2 games to work. I thought a "game shark" might help, but it turns out that those too, are region coded. Anyone have any ideas?
painted with psychedelic colors and flowers.
oh boy.
From the perspective of theorectical computer science this means nothing. NP problems are measured by the speed they run on DETERMINISTIC *turing machines* which means traditional computers and the like. Remember that NP problems can be solved by nondeterministic turing machines in polynomial time. No one cares how long it takes on a quantum computer, because they aren't deterministic turing machines.
And if one NP-complete problem were found to have a polynomial time solution on a deterministic turing machine we could reduce all the other NP-complete problems to this problem in polynomial time and solve them just as fast. This is how one goes about showing a problem is NP-complete
I think you are confused actually.
I can't comment on the math in the second half of your posting but your definition of NP-complete is wrong on many levels.
First of all, it isn't known whether NP is equal to P or not, so its nto safe to say that there is no O(n^k) solution to those problems. This is minor because it is widely believed that P!=NP.
Second, NP is a superset of P. That means all the problems in P are also in NP!
Third, your definition is wrong. NP is the group of problems that can be solved by a nondeterministic turing machine in polynomial time. If you don't know what this means, there are several good books out there. Come back to this post when you have read them.
Fourth, it hasn't been shown that there are ANY problems in NP, but not in P, but aren't NP-complete! That means all the so-called NP (excluding P here) problems we know of are NP-complete! Now they may be some that lie "between NP-complete and P but no one has found one yet. Or proven that a problem we know of lives in this set.
Lastly, there are harder problems than NP-complete problems. See PSPACE and EXPTIME.
ok, there are many things wrong here...
first of all, dividing an NP-complete problem up into a finite number of parts, like the "parallel" pizza delivers does not make it easier. It is still NP-complete.
second, O(google) is it is the same as O(1) because "google" is a constant.
third, "google" is spelled googol when it refers to the number, but I admit thats just nitpicking
from the "SF Fandom" section:
slash (n.) antedating 1988, (sense is fan fiction
about a pairing of fictional characters)
I will die laughing the day I see this in the dictionary.
btw, for those who don't know when they mean when they say "pairing" they mean male/male or female/female pairings. In practice though they mean male/male pairings. I've never heard of a f/f pairing called slash.
I've been playing the Japanese version of FFX for the past few months (though I haven't beaten it yet). I must admit it is a *very* visually appealing game. The character's are also more likable than, say Squall of FF8. It also has an interesting new level advancement system where you get points which allow you to move your characters around a large map - different locations means getting different abilities. Its kind of hard to describe but it works really well, and it is easier to use than say, junctioning, and makes more sense than materia.
The voice acting in the Japanese version is *amazing* and I hope they got American actors that are up to par. I would have prefered that the American version of this game have just been subtitled in English, but I understand most wouldn't like that.
The only downside, and this is sort of major for me, is that the game is *extremely* linear in nature. The story is great but it doesn't give you much chance to explore outside the rigid framework they give you. I've noticed there's been less and less freedom in FF games recently.
Lastly, I must say the underwater polo game is awesome!
No, they are NOT more efficient.
Look, it says that they are one thousandth the size, but with one millionth the power output of
a large turbine in a power station. That means they are one thousand time LESS EFFICIENT.
Did *anyone* actually read this article??
Hey dum dum,
This isn't efficient. Didn't you read the article???
Its one-thousandth the size but one-millionth
the power output of a power station.
They didn't create this for *efficiency*.
It was made because its small and portable.
This won't work...
If we all go out and buy Xboxes, MS will be
able to go to game developers and say "look
how many units we've sold! Don't you want to
be able to develop for such a large audience?"
MS will end up with more developers licensing to
develop for the Xbox and MS will make money. Its the game developers that lose out when then don't
sell any games.
We aren't talking about disks though. We are talking FILE SIZES.
Disk manufacturers somehow get away with a pretty
controversial marketing scam. Everyone else in
the computer world uses the power of two method.
Including people who sell computer memory.
1024 bytes = 1 kilobyte
1024*1024 = 1 megabyte
1024*1024*1024 = 1 gigabyte
1024*1024*1024*1024 = 1 terabyte
1 petabyte is 2^50 bytes or:
1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes!
so 144 petabytes would be...
162,129,586,585,337,856 bytes
not
144,000,000,000,000,000 bytes
or 144115188075855872 bytes (2^48 *512)
I don't know where they get 2^48 * 512?
if it really is 2^48 * 512, well, I'm sorry but
that is only 128 petabytes!
In Microsoft eyes, any box not running Windows is a sale that they've lost. They are very serious about dominating the home market, the business market, the server market, ok, well, they leave the minis and mainframes for IBM.
So a web server running Linux is a loss for Microsoft's IIS. Just because Microsoft didn't have much share of that market in the past, it doesn't mean they don't expect to in the future. For example, when Netscape first started Microsoft didn't have any precense in the "internet realm". Now we talk about how IE dominates the browser world.
When you take this into account, you realize how pointless that article is...
After seeing what they had at SIGGRAPH last year, I can't wait to see what they have this year! (It said it would be cool in the article - look at the last line). The GSCube demo last year really was awesome.
um... According to the article it was 1 to 2 meters across and 30 metric tons.
That sounds car-sized to me.
I used to have Mediaone Cable. Since 1998 they provided us with a wonderful service. Every time you switched the channel a simple "white text on black background" text box popped up showing you what was on, when it started and ended, and a brief description of the show. The TV guide acessable through the set-top box was also simple, and easy to use. Sure, it looked a little retro, but all the features were there and quick to access. With the limited resolution of todays TVs, simple text and lines is the best way to present information. The set-top box was small and fit on top of our TV. We also saved $10 off our cable modem because we got cable from MediaOne. A bunch of mergers and acquisitions happened but our service stayed the same.
A few months ago, AT&T enticed us to sign up for their digital cable service by offering a reduced rate on our phone - the phone and cable would be one package which would be the same price as our cable alone now. They installed "digital cable" which included a set-top box wider than our (large) TV. Now we have pretty little menus. But they are so slow! It seems like it takes seconds to change the channel because it needs to "decode" the image. The menu boxes are larger and have less information in them. You need to hit an "info" button which takes you to an alternate screen in order to find out anything about what is on. That takes time, because it has to draw all those graphics and ads. Also, the bottom of the screen is filled up with advertisements whenever you switch channels! The picture quality has also suffered and there doesn't seem to be an easy way to change channels if you don't have the remote. To put it bluntly - it sucks!
And to top it all off it is actually more expensive because our phone bill has yet to be integrated into our cable bill. I would go back to the old system in a second, but I don't think they will let us.