Personally, I'm most interested in the sound department. The GameBoy Advance's sound capabilities were underpowered, even by the standards of the time. Even Sonic Advance 2 (fairly recent) has the sound effects stomping on the music.
I'm hoping that they get something up to at least a wavetable type of sound with some decent number of channels. And panning that has something between "hard left", "hard right", and "dead center". And maybe a few effects tossed in... doesn't have to be some sort of full EAX, but you know, some cheap chorusing or reverb.
Both graphics and sound quality are asymptomptic curves to increase quality; the GBA is doing pretty well for its screen size in the graphics department, even in 3D now (it's never going to look like a Playstation 1 at that resolution), but the sound quality is so early 1990's. Giving the sound system 10 or 20 times the power of the GBA would really add a lot to the system, IMHO.
Re:Check out my new weapon of choice
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I went to the MS Reader site and followed the links to the on-line publishers sites (such as B&N and amazon). In most cases, the reader format is only $1 cheaper, and sometimes $2 more expensive, than the corresponding paper book (soft or hardcover).
These facts being plainly obvious, the logical conclusion is either that A: The cost of setting up the Reader infrastructure is so high that these high prices must be charged to recoup them, or B: They want them to fail.
I don't know which it is. But there comes a time where the choice "They don't realize how stupid this is" ceases to be an option, and I think this is one of those times. These are not stupid people, they are out to make a buck, and if they aren't making money directly, they either expect to make money in the future, or are making it indirectly.
Re:More targets....
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The sound control works on a mixture of sheer volume and psychological effects; strictly speaking it's not a directly physical effect.
I really don't care to think of what would happen if a persons resonant frequency was "accidentally" broadcast.
Only in Star Trek does everything have a resonant frequency. "People" do not have resonant frequencies; we are too soft and too squishy. In order to have a resonant frequency there must be some kind of resonance, which arises because the waves (whatever they are) are sharply and cleanly reflected, and can reinforce each other. When they are mushed up, they cease to resonate and you get more normal, mundane effects.
Certain parts of the body, mostly bone, can have a resonant frequency, but everybody's will be different. In fact, if you try, you can probably locate your jawbone's resonant frequency. Every once in a long while (on the order of once every couple of years), something will manage to hit one of my bone's resonant frequencies loud enough to be very unpleasent, generally construction equipment. Even so, my bones didn't crumble for various reasons, including the fact that even bones don't have very good resonant frequencies, and it's embedded in a soft goo.
So you can't simply broadcast some magical noise and watch the crowd dissolve. Of course you could kill them with pure power; an explosion's concussion can do that. But that isn't really "sound" in the traditional sense (no real periodicity, just one burst, maybe two or three significant oscillations (for nuclear-sized blasts), and that's it; the essense of "sound" is the wave nature).
Star Trek really promotes some bad science here; really strong resonance, strong enough to hurt things, is not an every-day, everywhere-you-look phenomenon. Simple observation will confirm this fact; despite the wide variety of noise in the modern world, things conspicuously fail to blow themselves to smithereens because something was hit by its resonant frequency. It's the exception rather then the rule. You need a very regular structure that's also very hard, which doesn't happen much in nature. The reason we see any significant effects at all arises from our tendency to build regular and hard structures, like Tacoma Narrows or your shower (a rectangle box lines with tiles? Show me something like that in nature!).
A similar answer to this message's grandparent: You can pulverize some things with sound, but mostly just hard things. The technology is pretty simple and if it's easy or useful, it's already being used in industry somewhere for something. You don't sound used as a pulverizing weapon because it's useless for that purpose. Generally, if you're trying to pulverize something it's easier to just hit it (not being sarcastic), but I've seen some exceptions (and even that is just "loosening" things with sound, it's sound plus "conventional" pressure and some rotation that all comes together to do the drilling).
Re:Check out my new weapon of choice
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I can not tell you the number of times I fantasized about that while living in dorms, and not sleeping at 1am because someone needs to hear their rap at 90 dB.
To anyone who puts other people through that... try thinking about the fact that you're being a real jackass. I once had a roommate who could sleep right through that without being disturbed, but there are quite a few of us on the opposite end of the spectrum, too, who can't help but be annoyed at least, and made physically ill (headaches, nausea a couple times) by your crap. I truly wish this was just whining and I could choose not to be affected that way, because believe me, I would in a heartbeat, but it's not a choice.
(Of course, in my experience, the kind of person who may be reading this site may be proud of their speaker set but aren't the ones blasting it five or six hours a day, week in, week out, any time of day or night. But still, think about your actions and please consider others.)
Oh, and a hint to anyone about to move to college, especially a larger one: Every dorm administrator thinks their facilities are quiet, and will say so if you ask. This is because they live in air-conditioned offices as far away from the students as possible (possibly in another building), come in at 9am (when the students are all sleeping), and go home at 5pm (about two hours before the party really starts). They also have absolutely no interest in actually working to make the facilities quieter, even if they explicitly advertise it as a feature. If you are as bothered by this as I am (perhaps 1 or 2%), seriously consider moving *way* off campus. I now work at the University I went to, and a 20 minute drive was far enough away. (Note Michigan State University is huge; you can probably live closer to smaller ones.)
Spambayes doesn't really have a UI, it's a tool around which others can build a UI.
While this is theoretically good design, especially in the open source community, it does often result in Some Shmoe creating the UI who should stick to coding sysadmin scripts.;-)
The reason that plastics are seen to represent artificiality has nothing to do with their core makeup.
Yes, thank you for stating the obvious.
Perhaps if you re-read my message, you'll see that that in the context of the message it was replying to it makes perfect sense, and "why plastics represent artificiality" isn't germane to my message at all.
The whole point of the "plastics" line was that plastics represent the artificiality of adult life. If nanotubes are made of carbon, then they're not artificial enough!
Uh, what do you think plastic is made out of? The core of what most people think of as plastic (as opposed to the technical definition which focuses on properties rather then composition) is based on a chain of hydrocarbons, with some impurities.
In fact, what most people call "plastic" are closer to "natural" things then nanotubes; no "natural" lifeform consists of pure carbon, so a carbon + hydrogen mix is closer.
So, personally, I'd say (-1, Tried For Humor But Failed) on your post. >:-P
And remember, plastics are made out of all-natural atoms, so ignore the losers who think natural==good, and use plastic. This message not brought to you by the American Plastics Council, but my wallet wishes it was.
It looks like the poster's words need some highlighting:
But missing is any serious testing to see how they perform in relation to themselves and to other, non-Bayesian filters.
Despite the call for your experiences, if you just want to post "X rocks!", I think the poster was looking more for "X rocks more then Y!", where both X and Y are Bayes-type filter programs. I don't think he was asking for just announcements that Bayes rocks; I think he or she already knows that.
I mention this because I'd be interested in some comparisions too; there's a lot of sub-techniques out there. Are there any real differences, or are they all effectively the same? The latter would strongly indicate that there may not be any real progress to be made, if the entire space of Bayes-type solutions has flat effectiveness, for instance. It's an interesting question.
(Translation: For a long time, there was a vulnerability that would automatically and silently install files from malicious websites, which spyware makers exploited for their own use.)
Damit, how many times do you have to be told Wine Is Not an Emulator??!?!
(BTW,;-) . Wouldn't we just love to find out that Gates is running on wine (and beer, and vodka...)? Kinda symmetric, after all Slashdot, his arch nemesis, runs on Whine.)
Re:Turning into Java?
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No, I understand all that.
The wierd thing is so many things the academics want to do involve actively fighting Java in a way that you don't have to actively fight other languages. How many projects involve actively twiddling with Java byte codes? It's much easier to work at the compiler level; twiddling byte codes is a horrible way to do it.
It's not that it's a "bad" language, it's that it is B&D, and actively fights attempts to change it. I don't understand why you'd want to twiddle with Java bytecodes when you could instead work on a language where you have access to the whole thing, from source to compiled code/interpreter.
In other words, what it really boils down to is that Java is propreitary and protected, more then the language itself; goodness knows I'd never want to try to "improve" it in such a hostile environment. (Java is a BigCo playground.)
Re:why did she have to name him Ethan?
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The Bug
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Interesting; as a 25-ish Jeremy I've had the exact opposite scenario. In high school there were so many of us that when I heard my name I only turned to the person calling me if I recognized the voice. In fact the fastest way to get my attention is to call me Jerf (see nick), not because I'm necessarily smitten with it, but because it's sufficiently unusual that I can safely assume you mean me. (Apparently it is a relatively rare proper name in Norway, which I'm not likely to hear for real in my lifetime.) That's why it's my nick, too; it's unique enough that when I see it, I know with high probability it means me, even online where every "cool" nick is in use several thousand times over.
(However, it's not so rare that there's nobody with it; somebody beat me to it on the New York Times site, and every once in a while on a huge site I find it's been taken.)
"Ironically" (if it's still safe to use that word around here), my mother named Jeremy that because she thought it was an uncommon name.
Incidentally, for those who might want a nick like that (unusual, instantly recognizable), be ready to accept something that isn't a word in any language you know and just keep you eyes open; jerf started as a typo. Truly interesting and unusual nicks are just around the bend.
Mario Bros. 3 will be re-released as Super Mario Advance 4
Oh for the love of Pete, would it hurt Nintendo too much to release an originalgame for a change?
I thought after they released Yoshi's Island they'd be out of games. Well, I guess after 3 they really are out... what then?
Probably figure out how to jam Mario 64 onto the gameboy, although it might actually be easier to bother to write a new game at that point...
Re:Turning into Java?
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I don't think you can fairly call it a "language flaw" when they designed it without multiple inheritence for a reason.
Misfeature, then.
By hacker standards, anyhow. But Java is a B&D language that no real hacker would prefer over other non-B&D languages. (Which isn't to say some of us don't get suckered into it, often while at work, but we'd rather be doing something else.)
I am still mystified at the academic community's love of Java.
I guess the same could be said of many inventions (medecines are just biochemical discoveries).
One of the justifications for medicinal patents is that medicines are not Just biochemical discoveries. In fact, in order to be a useful medicine we do not necessarily need to know the exact molecular makeup.
Two things are necessary:
A process for manufacturing the medicine practically, which may be extremely complicated and non-obvious.
Knowlege about how to apply the medicine to best effect, which requires painstaking experimentation.
In pure patent theory, what the patent protect is the first one, and theoretically you can make the same medicine in a different manner and patent it yourself. Realistically in the current environment, I wouldn't recommend that.
For medicine, you also need FDA approval, but that doesn't apply to most things.
Neither of the major concerns apply to software; if you know the algorithm, implementation is typically trivial, a matter of transliteration (as opposed to even translation; there's a difference). And figuring out how to best apply the algorithm is usually trivially obvious in what it does. (Now, noticing there's a better algorithm isn't always so easy...) So algorithms aren't like other physical inventions, since physical inventions typically require a description of how to practically create them.
I suppose I ought to be grateful only one person didn't read my last paragraph completely.
When you're summarily executed for being suspected of belonging to an illegal religion in the United States anytime in the recent past (witchcraft was 300+ years ago), then I'll be willing to listen to people bitching about how China and the US are just a few steps away. In the meantime, it takes some deliberately selective viewing to equate a few injustices (widely perceived to be injustices, too) to the systematic and often fatal repression the Chinese government engages in.
Re:Words change in meaning over time
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Isn't It Ironic?
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Shifting meanings are accepted.
Munging twenty or thirty previously seperate words into one concept, however, is never conducive to communication. It's not a mere shift, it's active decay.
By the way, I love you. (To cite the worst offender I can think of off the top of my head.)
Because no matter what bombastic rhetoric the left may try to throw at us, the fact is the US is on the whole relatively responsible with that military power, and does not use it to repress people as we would be afraid China will.
Even the inevitable replies yelling about Iraq are off the mark; no matter how you slice it, we didn't off Saddam so that we would have the priviledge of repressing Iraqis.
People in the world do not seriously worry about American planes coming tommorow night, unless they've openly declared themselves to be America's enemies. Ask Taiwan how they'd feel about the Chinese becoming powerful, or many of the other Asian countries. Different stories.
(And to the inevitable whining leftists hitting reply right now: There's a world of difference between claiming perfection, which I'm not, and claiming essential responsibility. Why don't you try a more nuanced worldview on for size, with a few more grays and a few less blacks and whites?)
Software Patents are bad because they are oxymoronic; to summarize that link, the patent system was set up to protect certain kinds of things, and software is not that kind of thing. As a result, software patents fail miserably because patent protection is not appropriate. In order to make it appropriate, it has been twisted to the point of absurdity.
Don't know if this is what you're referring to, but Python after (I believe) 2.2 works this way; int calculations will transparently overflow into arbitrary precision integers.
Theoretically one could do the same for real numbers but it's not as easy as you think. I'm not sure a library that was both practical and fully general could be produced; reals are nasty little buggers.
In fact my intuition (normally pretty good at these things) is poking me and suggesting that it may be provable that such a library would be impossible in the general case since one can always construct a situation where any algorithm deciding how much precision to keep will decide to keep an arbitrary amount of it, meaning the calculations would take arbitrarily long, rendering the library useless. The question then is whether it's an odd corner case or something rather more likely to come up, and I suspect the latter because of the sensitivity of iterative algorithms.
You also have the problem of doing a "pre-calculation" to decide how much precision to keep, then doing the "real calculation", which isn't impossible but would be impossible to retrofit into a language; you'd need a special language just for this library. You can imagine a scenario where you're doing all sorts of fiddly calculations, and at the very end you do one last comparision against, say, 1.0, and your number is.9999 +/-.01, so you'd need to re-do the entire calculation with more precision. This problem isn't insurmountable like the previous problem, but it would still be quite tricky to get right, and tricky to use correctly, too. (Precalculation may even turn out to be impossible, so you'd have to speculatively execute the calculations and then discover you needed more precision, which would cause even worse performance in the worst case.)
Yes, because goodness knows the original Quidditch rules where a work of art, destined to echo down the ages, and were so well-thought-out and conceived that not only were they ideal for a diversionary color device in a children's book series AND some nifty special effects shots*, but are also perfect to actually play with... despite being some of the the most unbalanced, crappy rules in the history of fake games.
*: Actually, those are some of my least favorite shots in the movies, because having played my fair share of twitch games like Quake and such, I can't help but realize as I'm watching "Quidditch" on the big screen that no real human would survive the game. The people are moving around at what, thirty, forty miles an hour? So an oncoming person zips by you at sixty miles an hour, swinging a stick at you no less! (Oh, sure, they're really swinging at the blodger. At least, that's what the Slytheryn player tells the ref when they get caught, right?) Nobody's reactions are that fast. (And you don't really get to go with "Well, they're wizards, they're special", because they're not made out as supermen in any other way...) The shots tear me right out of my suspension of disbelief.
I suspect that much of the problem is taking the scenes out of the book too literally; Quidditch could kind of work if you couldn't just go zipping around on a broom at full speed, but instead were limited to 10 or 15 mph... although even that would be enough to kill nearly instantly if two people collided head-on the wrong way.
On that topic, the Playstation game designers will suffer from similar problems, since they have to actually make the game playable in 3D while allowing human-speed reflexes to play the game. Given the relative realism of 3D, they're going to have to actually decide how fast these people are going in an accurate model. I'd be intrigued to hear how they are going to do that/have done that.
I wonder whether that is an artifact of the process, rather than evidence of a natural law.
No way to know for certain. But it's pretty compelling.
For example, it has been suggested that the mere act of observing a phenomena can affect the outcome. Whether this is because the measuring instruments have an inbuilt error that cannot be overcome, or whether the observer has a mental bias towards a particular interpretation.
With respect, no, neither of those reasons are it. Observing a phenomenon can change the outcome because when we are observing a phenomenon, we are part of the system itself. If someone writes an essay about how we're going to hell in a handbasket and they convince enough people, they might create a self-negating prediction, because they were part of the system they were writing about. We affect quantum interactions by observation because we are part of the universe, subject to those same laws.
When we observe the results of some evolutionary-type computation, we are not part of the system. The evolutionary computation is taking place in a computer, and we can freely observe it to our hearts content, even replay it completely identically to a previous run (useful for debugging the simulation infrastructure), without affecting the final outcome in the slightest. We can speed it up, slow it down, even reverse it with careful programming, and it will never "know" the difference.
All these models are mathematical models, and while "a whole heaping stack of evidence" isn't proof and it's very possible that there's something about real-world genetics that we are failing to capture in our simulations that might somehow make the real world not be punctuated (especially as we know we are not capturing everything about real-world genetics), it's still compelling that our models and the fossil record say the same thing. As they are mathematical models (based on computation), it is not really possible for "observation" to change their nature, any more then the "slope of a line" changes based on observing it. (And remember that "slope of a line" is not a fuzzy-wuzzy English phrase, it's a carefully defined mathematical term that also does not change based on observation; even if we all agreed to define "slope of a line" as something different then we do now the current definition would still "exist" to the same extent it does now.)
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I'm most interested in the sound department. The GameBoy Advance's sound capabilities were underpowered, even by the standards of the time. Even Sonic Advance 2 (fairly recent) has the sound effects stomping on the music.
I'm hoping that they get something up to at least a wavetable type of sound with some decent number of channels. And panning that has something between "hard left", "hard right", and "dead center". And maybe a few effects tossed in... doesn't have to be some sort of full EAX, but you know, some cheap chorusing or reverb.
Both graphics and sound quality are asymptomptic curves to increase quality; the GBA is doing pretty well for its screen size in the graphics department, even in 3D now (it's never going to look like a Playstation 1 at that resolution), but the sound quality is so early 1990's. Giving the sound system 10 or 20 times the power of the GBA would really add a lot to the system, IMHO.
Same to you.
I went to the MS Reader site and followed the links to the on-line publishers sites (such as B&N and amazon). In most cases, the reader format is only $1 cheaper, and sometimes $2 more expensive, than the corresponding paper book (soft or hardcover).
These facts being plainly obvious, the logical conclusion is either that A: The cost of setting up the Reader infrastructure is so high that these high prices must be charged to recoup them, or B: They want them to fail.
I don't know which it is. But there comes a time where the choice "They don't realize how stupid this is" ceases to be an option, and I think this is one of those times. These are not stupid people, they are out to make a buck, and if they aren't making money directly, they either expect to make money in the future, or are making it indirectly.
The sound control works on a mixture of sheer volume and psychological effects; strictly speaking it's not a directly physical effect.
I really don't care to think of what would happen if a persons resonant frequency was "accidentally" broadcast.
Only in Star Trek does everything have a resonant frequency. "People" do not have resonant frequencies; we are too soft and too squishy. In order to have a resonant frequency there must be some kind of resonance, which arises because the waves (whatever they are) are sharply and cleanly reflected, and can reinforce each other. When they are mushed up, they cease to resonate and you get more normal, mundane effects.
Certain parts of the body, mostly bone, can have a resonant frequency, but everybody's will be different. In fact, if you try, you can probably locate your jawbone's resonant frequency. Every once in a long while (on the order of once every couple of years), something will manage to hit one of my bone's resonant frequencies loud enough to be very unpleasent, generally construction equipment. Even so, my bones didn't crumble for various reasons, including the fact that even bones don't have very good resonant frequencies, and it's embedded in a soft goo.
So you can't simply broadcast some magical noise and watch the crowd dissolve. Of course you could kill them with pure power; an explosion's concussion can do that. But that isn't really "sound" in the traditional sense (no real periodicity, just one burst, maybe two or three significant oscillations (for nuclear-sized blasts), and that's it; the essense of "sound" is the wave nature).
Star Trek really promotes some bad science here; really strong resonance, strong enough to hurt things, is not an every-day, everywhere-you-look phenomenon. Simple observation will confirm this fact; despite the wide variety of noise in the modern world, things conspicuously fail to blow themselves to smithereens because something was hit by its resonant frequency. It's the exception rather then the rule. You need a very regular structure that's also very hard, which doesn't happen much in nature. The reason we see any significant effects at all arises from our tendency to build regular and hard structures, like Tacoma Narrows or your shower (a rectangle box lines with tiles? Show me something like that in nature!).
A similar answer to this message's grandparent: You can pulverize some things with sound, but mostly just hard things. The technology is pretty simple and if it's easy or useful, it's already being used in industry somewhere for something. You don't sound used as a pulverizing weapon because it's useless for that purpose. Generally, if you're trying to pulverize something it's easier to just hit it (not being sarcastic), but I've seen some exceptions (and even that is just "loosening" things with sound, it's sound plus "conventional" pressure and some rotation that all comes together to do the drilling).
I can not tell you the number of times I fantasized about that while living in dorms, and not sleeping at 1am because someone needs to hear their rap at 90 dB.
To anyone who puts other people through that... try thinking about the fact that you're being a real jackass. I once had a roommate who could sleep right through that without being disturbed, but there are quite a few of us on the opposite end of the spectrum, too, who can't help but be annoyed at least, and made physically ill (headaches, nausea a couple times) by your crap. I truly wish this was just whining and I could choose not to be affected that way, because believe me, I would in a heartbeat, but it's not a choice.
(Of course, in my experience, the kind of person who may be reading this site may be proud of their speaker set but aren't the ones blasting it five or six hours a day, week in, week out, any time of day or night. But still, think about your actions and please consider others.)
Oh, and a hint to anyone about to move to college, especially a larger one: Every dorm administrator thinks their facilities are quiet, and will say so if you ask. This is because they live in air-conditioned offices as far away from the students as possible (possibly in another building), come in at 9am (when the students are all sleeping), and go home at 5pm (about two hours before the party really starts). They also have absolutely no interest in actually working to make the facilities quieter, even if they explicitly advertise it as a feature. If you are as bothered by this as I am (perhaps 1 or 2%), seriously consider moving *way* off campus. I now work at the University I went to, and a 20 minute drive was far enough away. (Note Michigan State University is huge; you can probably live closer to smaller ones.)
Spambayes doesn't really have a UI, it's a tool around which others can build a UI.
;-)
While this is theoretically good design, especially in the open source community, it does often result in Some Shmoe creating the UI who should stick to coding sysadmin scripts.
The reason that plastics are seen to represent artificiality has nothing to do with their core makeup.
Yes, thank you for stating the obvious.
Perhaps if you re-read my message, you'll see that that in the context of the message it was replying to it makes perfect sense, and "why plastics represent artificiality" isn't germane to my message at all.
The whole point of the "plastics" line was that plastics represent the artificiality of adult life. If nanotubes are made of carbon, then they're not artificial enough!
Uh, what do you think plastic is made out of? The core of what most people think of as plastic (as opposed to the technical definition which focuses on properties rather then composition) is based on a chain of hydrocarbons, with some impurities.
In fact, what most people call "plastic" are closer to "natural" things then nanotubes; no "natural" lifeform consists of pure carbon, so a carbon + hydrogen mix is closer.
So, personally, I'd say (-1, Tried For Humor But Failed) on your post. >:-P
And remember, plastics are made out of all-natural atoms, so ignore the losers who think natural==good, and use plastic. This message not brought to you by the American Plastics Council, but my wallet wishes it was.
It looks like the poster's words need some highlighting:
But missing is any serious testing to see how they perform in relation to themselves and to other, non-Bayesian filters.
Despite the call for your experiences, if you just want to post "X rocks!", I think the poster was looking more for "X rocks more then Y!", where both X and Y are Bayes-type filter programs. I don't think he was asking for just announcements that Bayes rocks; I think he or she already knows that.
I mention this because I'd be interested in some comparisions too; there's a lot of sub-techniques out there. Are there any real differences, or are they all effectively the same? The latter would strongly indicate that there may not be any real progress to be made, if the entire space of Bayes-type solutions has flat effectiveness, for instance. It's an interesting question.
Sure, they can be installed by ActiveX, but only if you're stupid enough to click 'yes' on those random installs. [emphasis mine]
You wish.
(Translation: For a long time, there was a vulnerability that would automatically and silently install files from malicious websites, which spyware makers exploited for their own use.)
Damit, how many times do you have to be told Wine Is Not an Emulator??!?!
;-) . Wouldn't we just love to find out that Gates is running on wine (and beer, and vodka...)? Kinda symmetric, after all Slashdot, his arch nemesis, runs on Whine.)
(BTW,
Sorry; original Mario game. Not Wario either...
No, I understand all that.
The wierd thing is so many things the academics want to do involve actively fighting Java in a way that you don't have to actively fight other languages. How many projects involve actively twiddling with Java byte codes? It's much easier to work at the compiler level; twiddling byte codes is a horrible way to do it.
It's not that it's a "bad" language, it's that it is B&D, and actively fights attempts to change it. I don't understand why you'd want to twiddle with Java bytecodes when you could instead work on a language where you have access to the whole thing, from source to compiled code/interpreter.
In other words, what it really boils down to is that Java is propreitary and protected, more then the language itself; goodness knows I'd never want to try to "improve" it in such a hostile environment. (Java is a BigCo playground.)
Interesting; as a 25-ish Jeremy I've had the exact opposite scenario. In high school there were so many of us that when I heard my name I only turned to the person calling me if I recognized the voice. In fact the fastest way to get my attention is to call me Jerf (see nick), not because I'm necessarily smitten with it, but because it's sufficiently unusual that I can safely assume you mean me. (Apparently it is a relatively rare proper name in Norway, which I'm not likely to hear for real in my lifetime.) That's why it's my nick, too; it's unique enough that when I see it, I know with high probability it means me, even online where every "cool" nick is in use several thousand times over.
(However, it's not so rare that there's nobody with it; somebody beat me to it on the New York Times site, and every once in a while on a huge site I find it's been taken.)
"Ironically" (if it's still safe to use that word around here), my mother named Jeremy that because she thought it was an uncommon name.
Incidentally, for those who might want a nick like that (unusual, instantly recognizable), be ready to accept something that isn't a word in any language you know and just keep you eyes open; jerf started as a typo. Truly interesting and unusual nicks are just around the bend.
Yeah, it's offtopic. Bite me.
Mario Bros. 3 will be re-released as Super Mario Advance 4
Oh for the love of Pete, would it hurt Nintendo too much to release an original game for a change?
I thought after they released Yoshi's Island they'd be out of games. Well, I guess after 3 they really are out... what then?
Probably figure out how to jam Mario 64 onto the gameboy, although it might actually be easier to bother to write a new game at that point...
I don't think you can fairly call it a "language flaw" when they designed it without multiple inheritence for a reason.
Misfeature, then.
By hacker standards, anyhow. But Java is a B&D language that no real hacker would prefer over other non-B&D languages. (Which isn't to say some of us don't get suckered into it, often while at work, but we'd rather be doing something else.)
I am still mystified at the academic community's love of Java.
One of the justifications for medicinal patents is that medicines are not Just biochemical discoveries. In fact, in order to be a useful medicine we do not necessarily need to know the exact molecular makeup.
Two things are necessary:
- A process for manufacturing the medicine practically, which may be extremely complicated and non-obvious.
- Knowlege about how to apply the medicine to best effect, which requires painstaking experimentation.
In pure patent theory, what the patent protect is the first one, and theoretically you can make the same medicine in a different manner and patent it yourself. Realistically in the current environment, I wouldn't recommend that.For medicine, you also need FDA approval, but that doesn't apply to most things.
Neither of the major concerns apply to software; if you know the algorithm, implementation is typically trivial, a matter of transliteration (as opposed to even translation; there's a difference). And figuring out how to best apply the algorithm is usually trivially obvious in what it does. (Now, noticing there's a better algorithm isn't always so easy...) So algorithms aren't like other physical inventions, since physical inventions typically require a description of how to practically create them.
I suppose I ought to be grateful only one person didn't read my last paragraph completely.
When you're summarily executed for being suspected of belonging to an illegal religion in the United States anytime in the recent past (witchcraft was 300+ years ago), then I'll be willing to listen to people bitching about how China and the US are just a few steps away. In the meantime, it takes some deliberately selective viewing to equate a few injustices (widely perceived to be injustices, too) to the systematic and often fatal repression the Chinese government engages in.
Shifting meanings are accepted.
Munging twenty or thirty previously seperate words into one concept, however, is never conducive to communication. It's not a mere shift, it's active decay.
By the way, I love you. (To cite the worst offender I can think of off the top of my head.)
Because no matter what bombastic rhetoric the left may try to throw at us, the fact is the US is on the whole relatively responsible with that military power, and does not use it to repress people as we would be afraid China will.
Even the inevitable replies yelling about Iraq are off the mark; no matter how you slice it, we didn't off Saddam so that we would have the priviledge of repressing Iraqis.
People in the world do not seriously worry about American planes coming tommorow night, unless they've openly declared themselves to be America's enemies. Ask Taiwan how they'd feel about the Chinese becoming powerful, or many of the other Asian countries. Different stories.
(And to the inevitable whining leftists hitting reply right now: There's a world of difference between claiming perfection, which I'm not, and claiming essential responsibility. Why don't you try a more nuanced worldview on for size, with a few more grays and a few less blacks and whites?)
Software Patents are bad because they are oxymoronic; to summarize that link, the patent system was set up to protect certain kinds of things, and software is not that kind of thing. As a result, software patents fail miserably because patent protection is not appropriate. In order to make it appropriate, it has been twisted to the point of absurdity.
Don't know if this is what you're referring to, but Python after (I believe) 2.2 works this way; int calculations will transparently overflow into arbitrary precision integers.
.9999 +/- .01, so you'd need to re-do the entire calculation with more precision. This problem isn't insurmountable like the previous problem, but it would still be quite tricky to get right, and tricky to use correctly, too. (Precalculation may even turn out to be impossible, so you'd have to speculatively execute the calculations and then discover you needed more precision, which would cause even worse performance in the worst case.)
Theoretically one could do the same for real numbers but it's not as easy as you think. I'm not sure a library that was both practical and fully general could be produced; reals are nasty little buggers.
In fact my intuition (normally pretty good at these things) is poking me and suggesting that it may be provable that such a library would be impossible in the general case since one can always construct a situation where any algorithm deciding how much precision to keep will decide to keep an arbitrary amount of it, meaning the calculations would take arbitrarily long, rendering the library useless. The question then is whether it's an odd corner case or something rather more likely to come up, and I suspect the latter because of the sensitivity of iterative algorithms.
You also have the problem of doing a "pre-calculation" to decide how much precision to keep, then doing the "real calculation", which isn't impossible but would be impossible to retrofit into a language; you'd need a special language just for this library. You can imagine a scenario where you're doing all sorts of fiddly calculations, and at the very end you do one last comparision against, say, 1.0, and your number is
I knew someone would comment about an obvious comment being too obvious.
Well, in this crowd, you can always salvage a joke by going one meta higher, right? Yeah, like this.
Yes, because goodness knows the original Quidditch rules where a work of art, destined to echo down the ages, and were so well-thought-out and conceived that not only were they ideal for a diversionary color device in a children's book series AND some nifty special effects shots*, but are also perfect to actually play with... despite being some of the the most unbalanced, crappy rules in the history of fake games.
*: Actually, those are some of my least favorite shots in the movies, because having played my fair share of twitch games like Quake and such, I can't help but realize as I'm watching "Quidditch" on the big screen that no real human would survive the game. The people are moving around at what, thirty, forty miles an hour? So an oncoming person zips by you at sixty miles an hour, swinging a stick at you no less! (Oh, sure, they're really swinging at the blodger. At least, that's what the Slytheryn player tells the ref when they get caught, right?) Nobody's reactions are that fast. (And you don't really get to go with "Well, they're wizards, they're special", because they're not made out as supermen in any other way...) The shots tear me right out of my suspension of disbelief.
I suspect that much of the problem is taking the scenes out of the book too literally; Quidditch could kind of work if you couldn't just go zipping around on a broom at full speed, but instead were limited to 10 or 15 mph... although even that would be enough to kill nearly instantly if two people collided head-on the wrong way.
On that topic, the Playstation game designers will suffer from similar problems, since they have to actually make the game playable in 3D while allowing human-speed reflexes to play the game. Given the relative realism of 3D, they're going to have to actually decide how fast these people are going in an accurate model. I'd be intrigued to hear how they are going to do that/have done that.
I wonder whether that is an artifact of the process, rather than evidence of a natural law.
No way to know for certain. But it's pretty compelling.
For example, it has been suggested that the mere act of observing a phenomena can affect the outcome. Whether this is because the measuring instruments have an inbuilt error that cannot be overcome, or whether the observer has a mental bias towards a particular interpretation.
With respect, no, neither of those reasons are it. Observing a phenomenon can change the outcome because when we are observing a phenomenon, we are part of the system itself. If someone writes an essay about how we're going to hell in a handbasket and they convince enough people, they might create a self-negating prediction, because they were part of the system they were writing about. We affect quantum interactions by observation because we are part of the universe, subject to those same laws.
When we observe the results of some evolutionary-type computation, we are not part of the system. The evolutionary computation is taking place in a computer, and we can freely observe it to our hearts content, even replay it completely identically to a previous run (useful for debugging the simulation infrastructure), without affecting the final outcome in the slightest. We can speed it up, slow it down, even reverse it with careful programming, and it will never "know" the difference.
All these models are mathematical models, and while "a whole heaping stack of evidence" isn't proof and it's very possible that there's something about real-world genetics that we are failing to capture in our simulations that might somehow make the real world not be punctuated (especially as we know we are not capturing everything about real-world genetics), it's still compelling that our models and the fossil record say the same thing. As they are mathematical models (based on computation), it is not really possible for "observation" to change their nature, any more then the "slope of a line" changes based on observing it. (And remember that "slope of a line" is not a fuzzy-wuzzy English phrase, it's a carefully defined mathematical term that also does not change based on observation; even if we all agreed to define "slope of a line" as something different then we do now the current definition would still "exist" to the same extent it does now.)