Indeed, PacMan was solved, but that doesn't mean it can't be NP-Hard.
People solve Sudokus every day; a computer can do it in a flash - yet Sudoku is NP-Complete. In a 9x9 grid, the scale of the problem remains small enough that you can brute-force it. Make a bigger Sudoku -- or a bigger pacman maze -- and it would become significantly more difficult to solve.
I think the way Uncle Bob puts it is that including a comment is an admission that you're unable to write code that's as expressive as you'd like.
*But* there's nothing wrong with making that admission. The flow is:
while(code can be made more readable within practical constraints) {
make code more readable } if(code is readable enough to not require comments) {
great! } else {
write a comment }
The less well off can still use the existing routes on the conventional lines, which will take longer and on older trains but will still exist once the high speed project is live.
We're told that there will be no reduction in investment to the existing lines, so we should expect the existing trains to be kept up to date, and run no slower than before. The difference is that some of the demand will be diverted to the HS line, so we should expect trains to be less overcrowded (although an increase in overall demand may cancel that out). We can hope that competition between the two routes will push ticket prices down.
What I actually worry about is that the added capacity encourages more people and companies to have more trips into London, where they will use the tube to get to their final destinations and that is really hard to upgrade.
If it gets that bad, people won't want to go to London simply because when you get there it's not pleasant!
I think there's a general hope that it'll encourage more businesses to locate themselves outside London.
We could have HS2 completed in six months if we conscripted every man of working age to work on it, threw every last penny of the national budget into it, and took a lax view of health and safety and due process.
Let's be generous, and think less of property prices, and more of the general pleasantness of the place you live.
Imagine, you've put everything you have into a modest home that backs onto some farmland, and take great pleasure in having your breakfast looking out over the grazing sheep and the thicket of trees on the horizon.
Then one day, you're told that your view is going to be of a grey concrete wall, behind which there will be a train line.
I think HS2 is necessary, and should be built. But I also think those whose homes are affected should be handsomely compensated.
No, the poor don't have access to significant credit,
Depends what you mean by "significant". A £300 loan to pay for a washing machine is significant if you're on a low income.
The fact is that the poor in the UK (and I imagine the US) *do* borrow. That they are low-income, and therefore high risk, just means that their loans are expensive. Which means they remain poor.
Prices for tomorrow are always expensive, but if you book in advance it goes down a lot.
Not always. Unlike some people, I don't have many complaints about the UK rail system. But the vagaries of ticket pricing is irritating.
*Sometimes* booking in advance is much cheaper, but not reliably so. *Sometimes* it's cheaper to buy a fare on the day, at the ticket window, than it is to book two weeks in advance.
If you book in advance, you have to book a specific train. *Sometimes* that includes a reserved seat, sometimes it doesn't. If you get a reserved seat, you get the advantage of knowing you'll be able to sit. Either way, you have the disadvantage of lack of flexibility, and potentially extra cost if you miss the train and have to get a later one.
Walk-up tickets tend to give you flexibility (any train today; any return train within a couple of weeks) but no reserved seating.
All in all, there are so many parameters, it makes choices way more complicated than I'd like.
Additionally, if you split a long journey into several legs, and buy a ticket for each leg separately, it's often *much* cheaper -- even though you remain on the same train throughout the journey. I once travelled from Leamington Spa to Durham using a wad of tickets that looked like a deck of cards: Leamington to Birmingham, Birmingham to Sheffield, Sheffield to Leeds, Leeds to Durham. We held everyone up at the ticket collection machine; typing four long booking references in -- but it saved £50. It's an absolute nonsense.
Sure it won't be undisturbed natural woodland but there's almost none of that anyway; too many hundreds of years of human interference have already been and gone.
Indeed. Most people will look at a British countryside scene and mutter words like "unspoilt" or "natural when it's really nothing of the sort.
- almost all grazing land would naturally be forest
- most of our forests are managed conifers being grown for timber. Indigenous forestry is deciduous.
- hedges, dry stone walls are pretty, but they ain't natural.
- a typical chocolate box scene will include roads (OK, not motorways...), trains etc.
I have a Kinect, but I never use the motion sensing aspect since my living room is just slightly too small. For it to see my whole body, I have to to stand as far back as I can. I don't think my room is all that small by British standards (millions of people live in Victorian semis like mine).
I find myself wishing there was a wide angle lens addon (would that work?)
People's desktop PCs tend to be in studies that are smaller than the rooms where they keep their PCs. And people tend to sit in front of PCs. I think developers are going to need to start concentrating on developing software that deals with less of the body.
I find the voice recognition stuff pretty handy. "Xbox, play DVD" is easier than searching for the remote.
It's not only about resolution. Film also has *massive* exposure latitude. That means it's very forgiving of over/under exposure. It also means you can capture "HDR" without making multiple exposures.
I don't know whether high end CCDs are approaching the exposure latitude of film. Consumer CCDs certainly don't.
OK, it's a daft idea for various security related reasons -- but that's fine. People patent daft ideas all the time; doesn't mean they plan to implement them.
What I don't get is, why bring power adapters into it? Why not patent a more general case, then if someone builds it into a power adapter, the patent covers it. If someone builds it into (say) an MP3 player, the patent covers that too.
I do think it's fake. But when people have phones that shoot 720p video and upload it to YouTube in a couple of clicks, being in HD isn't the suspicious bit.
Dropbox is essentially just a middleman for Amazon s3, their entire business model depends on Amazon (or another provider) continuing to remain cheap forever, maybe a good business model but tying your fortunes so closely to another company like that seems like it's just asking for trouble.
My emphasis.
It's a pretty safe bet that *some* storage will be cheaply available for evermore. When they reach a certain size, it become viable to build their own.
The freemium model is a sucky model. It does not mean that freemium can't work for some.
If it works for some, then by definition it's not a sucky model. It's just not a magic bullet that works in every circumstance.
Just like how OpenSource works for some, eg Redhat, but on the whole Open Source is devastating the software development and sell model.
Because the wellbeing of the software-as-a-saleable-item market is not a success criterion for Open Source.
If my refrigerator manufacture business is a disaster for your "importing ice from the Arctic" business, that doesn't mean that mine is a sucky business model.
Sellers use PayPal because eBay buyers find it convenient. Sellers use eBay because eBay has no close competitors.
I actually don't know of a sufficiently convenient way to transfer money to a foreign recipient who doesn't have a credit card merchant account, other than PayPal.
Horror stories or not, there isn't an alternative (or if there is, it's doing a bad enough job of publicity that it's not reached me)
Have you actually done a survey on this, or is it just an assumption? In my experience, computer voice falls into the uncanny valley very quickly - people find computers that try to sound like humans to be creepy.
"Look Dave, I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over. "
But, you make a 90 degree right turn as you join the roundabout, then 360 degrees left, then another 90 degree right turn as you leave it (in places where they drive on the right)
ITS CG, WHY IS THE CAMERA SHAKING SO MUCH, YOU HAVE COMPLETE CONTROL. And then cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, so many fast cuts, who knows what is going on.
It's an attempt to fool your brain into thinking it's not CG. A real camera wouldn't be able to stay still in those circumstances; it would shake around. A real camera wouldn't be able to get more than a few seconds of useful footage. A typical real camera would take long exposures to make the most of available light, resulting in lots of motion blur.
We don't reason about those things, but we've got used to those artefacts as stamps of authenticity.
I agree it's gone too far, although I don't think Transformers would have been improved if it had all been crystal sharp. What was going on was boring, regardless of how it was shot.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed, PacMan was solved, but that doesn't mean it can't be NP-Hard.
People solve Sudokus every day; a computer can do it in a flash - yet Sudoku is NP-Complete. In a 9x9 grid, the scale of the problem remains small enough that you can brute-force it. Make a bigger Sudoku -- or a bigger pacman maze -- and it would become significantly more difficult to solve.
The Raspberry Pi's GPU has h264 decoding in it.
I look forward to being able to download a 3D model of an LP, that I can play on my turntable. Take that, RIAA!
High five!
I think the way Uncle Bob puts it is that including a comment is an admission that you're unable to write code that's as expressive as you'd like.
*But* there's nothing wrong with making that admission. The flow is:
while(code can be made more readable within practical constraints) {
make code more readable
}
if(code is readable enough to not require comments) {
great!
} else {
write a comment
}
You're contradicting yourself.
Paragraph 1: this is a huge and pointless waste of money
Paragraph 2: we should invest in infrastructure
Although the shorter journey time is a feature, this project will *treble* the capacity of network as a whole. That's the point of it.
The less well off can still use the existing routes on the conventional lines, which will take longer and on older trains but will still exist once the high speed project is live.
We're told that there will be no reduction in investment to the existing lines, so we should expect the existing trains to be kept up to date, and run no slower than before. The difference is that some of the demand will be diverted to the HS line, so we should expect trains to be less overcrowded (although an increase in overall demand may cancel that out). We can hope that competition between the two routes will push ticket prices down.
What I actually worry about is that the added capacity encourages more people and companies to have more trips into London, where they will use the tube to get to their final destinations and that is really hard to upgrade.
If it gets that bad, people won't want to go to London simply because when you get there it's not pleasant!
I think there's a general hope that it'll encourage more businesses to locate themselves outside London.
+4 insightful?
We could have HS2 completed in six months if we conscripted every man of working age to work on it, threw every last penny of the national budget into it, and took a lax view of health and safety and due process.
Let's be generous, and think less of property prices, and more of the general pleasantness of the place you live.
Imagine, you've put everything you have into a modest home that backs onto some farmland, and take great pleasure in having your breakfast looking out over the grazing sheep and the thicket of trees on the horizon.
Then one day, you're told that your view is going to be of a grey concrete wall, behind which there will be a train line.
I think HS2 is necessary, and should be built. But I also think those whose homes are affected should be handsomely compensated.
Well, there's the beach under Spaghetti Junction... http://www.bbc.co.uk/birmingham/content/articles/2008/01/31/spaghetti_junction_beach_feature.shtml
The "Costa Del Gravelly Hill"...
No, the poor don't have access to significant credit,
Depends what you mean by "significant". A £300 loan to pay for a washing machine is significant if you're on a low income.
The fact is that the poor in the UK (and I imagine the US) *do* borrow. That they are low-income, and therefore high risk, just means that their loans are expensive. Which means they remain poor.
Prices for tomorrow are always expensive, but if you book in advance it goes down a lot.
Not always. Unlike some people, I don't have many complaints about the UK rail system. But the vagaries of ticket pricing is irritating.
*Sometimes* booking in advance is much cheaper, but not reliably so. *Sometimes* it's cheaper to buy a fare on the day, at the ticket window, than it is to book two weeks in advance.
If you book in advance, you have to book a specific train. *Sometimes* that includes a reserved seat, sometimes it doesn't. If you get a reserved seat, you get the advantage of knowing you'll be able to sit. Either way, you have the disadvantage of lack of flexibility, and potentially extra cost if you miss the train and have to get a later one.
Walk-up tickets tend to give you flexibility (any train today; any return train within a couple of weeks) but no reserved seating.
All in all, there are so many parameters, it makes choices way more complicated than I'd like.
Additionally, if you split a long journey into several legs, and buy a ticket for each leg separately, it's often *much* cheaper -- even though you remain on the same train throughout the journey. I once travelled from Leamington Spa to Durham using a wad of tickets that looked like a deck of cards: Leamington to Birmingham, Birmingham to Sheffield, Sheffield to Leeds, Leeds to Durham. We held everyone up at the ticket collection machine; typing four long booking references in -- but it saved £50. It's an absolute nonsense.
Well I'll be blunt. The appearance of the countryside has exactly Jack Shit to do with environmental concerns.
The problem is that "environment" is an extremely overloaded term; broadly it just means "the stuff around you".
Appearance is one property of one's immediate environment, and it's important to some people.
Sure it won't be undisturbed natural woodland but there's almost none of that anyway; too many hundreds of years of human interference have already been and gone.
Indeed. Most people will look at a British countryside scene and mutter words like "unspoilt" or "natural when it's really nothing of the sort.
- almost all grazing land would naturally be forest
- most of our forests are managed conifers being grown for timber. Indigenous forestry is deciduous.
- hedges, dry stone walls are pretty, but they ain't natural.
- a typical chocolate box scene will include roads (OK, not motorways...), trains etc.
I have a Kinect, but I never use the motion sensing aspect since my living room is just slightly too small. For it to see my whole body, I have to to stand as far back as I can. I don't think my room is all that small by British standards (millions of people live in Victorian semis like mine).
I find myself wishing there was a wide angle lens addon (would that work?)
People's desktop PCs tend to be in studies that are smaller than the rooms where they keep their PCs. And people tend to sit in front of PCs. I think developers are going to need to start concentrating on developing software that deals with less of the body.
I find the voice recognition stuff pretty handy. "Xbox, play DVD" is easier than searching for the remote.
It's not only about resolution. Film also has *massive* exposure latitude. That means it's very forgiving of over/under exposure. It also means you can capture "HDR" without making multiple exposures.
I don't know whether high end CCDs are approaching the exposure latitude of film. Consumer CCDs certainly don't.
OK, it's a daft idea for various security related reasons -- but that's fine. People patent daft ideas all the time; doesn't mean they plan to implement them.
What I don't get is, why bring power adapters into it? Why not patent a more general case, then if someone builds it into a power adapter, the patent covers it. If someone builds it into (say) an MP3 player, the patent covers that too.
I do think it's fake. But when people have phones that shoot 720p video and upload it to YouTube in a couple of clicks, being in HD isn't the suspicious bit.
Dropbox is essentially just a middleman for Amazon s3, their entire business model depends on Amazon (or another provider) continuing to remain cheap forever, maybe a good business model but tying your fortunes so closely to another company like that seems like it's just asking for trouble.
My emphasis.
It's a pretty safe bet that *some* storage will be cheaply available for evermore. When they reach a certain size, it become viable to build their own.
Come on get real here...
The freemium model is a sucky model. It does not mean that freemium can't work for some.
If it works for some, then by definition it's not a sucky model. It's just not a magic bullet that works in every circumstance.
Just like how OpenSource works for some, eg Redhat, but on the whole Open Source is devastating the software development and sell model.
Because the wellbeing of the software-as-a-saleable-item market is not a success criterion for Open Source.
If my refrigerator manufacture business is a disaster for your "importing ice from the Arctic" business, that doesn't mean that mine is a sucky business model.
It is beyond me why anyone uses PayPal.
Sellers use PayPal because eBay buyers find it convenient. Sellers use eBay because eBay has no close competitors.
I actually don't know of a sufficiently convenient way to transfer money to a foreign recipient who doesn't have a credit card merchant account, other than PayPal.
Horror stories or not, there isn't an alternative (or if there is, it's doing a bad enough job of publicity that it's not reached me)
Have you actually done a survey on this, or is it just an assumption? In my experience, computer voice falls into the uncanny valley very quickly - people find computers that try to sound like humans to be creepy.
"Look Dave, I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over. "
Norman Lovett. I'd spend money on that.
Had me puzzling for a while.
But, you make a 90 degree right turn as you join the roundabout, then 360 degrees left, then another 90 degree right turn as you leave it (in places where they drive on the right)
ITS CG, WHY IS THE CAMERA SHAKING SO MUCH, YOU HAVE COMPLETE CONTROL. And then cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, so many fast cuts, who knows what is going on.
It's an attempt to fool your brain into thinking it's not CG. A real camera wouldn't be able to stay still in those circumstances; it would shake around. A real camera wouldn't be able to get more than a few seconds of useful footage. A typical real camera would take long exposures to make the most of available light, resulting in lots of motion blur.
We don't reason about those things, but we've got used to those artefacts as stamps of authenticity.
I agree it's gone too far, although I don't think Transformers would have been improved if it had all been crystal sharp. What was going on was boring, regardless of how it was shot.