Some of the features of the Google Toolbar are a bit computationally expensive (although I'm surprised creating a new window is so slow). One thing you can do is to remove buttons that you're not using from the toolbar; they won't use any extra CPU that way. This can be done by going to View -> Toolbars -> Customize (or right click on the toolbar and select Customize). From there, drag away any buttons that you don't plan on using. Also, simply hiding the toolbar isn't sufficient, you need to remove it from the toolbar completely. I hope that helps speed up your browser.
I agree, public online applications shouldn't be used for sensitive data. That's why webnote is open sourced under the BSD license. If you want to make private notes or have something that you're locally accountable for, you can run it on your own server and use SSL or whatever.
Additionally, that's one of the reasons I provide an RSS feed. You can easily save a local backup of your notes.
I've been playing around with the idea of a sticky-notes/post-it style app in a web browser using CSS and javascript (so it will work in IE 6+ and mozilla/firefox).
I call it webnote and anyone can play around with it. I mainly wanted something I could access anywhere but is a bit nicer than a plain text TODO file in my home directory (which is what I used to do). This is also easy to share with other people (partially because I haven't implemented any security yet).
I agree, right now gmail is in a testing stage. However, this makes me wonder why they're using an invite system to get new users. It seems like that would lead to an unrepresentative sampling of users that will test their system. That is, I bet most of the people who use gmail are more technically inclined that jane average email user who uses hotmail or yahoo mail. From a system standpoint, that may be a good test, but from a usability standpoint, that seems like a huge mistake. If they want people to test the system, they should come up with a way to get average people to use the system.
On a side note, I bet joe average email user doesn't care too much about having a gig of email. I bet they would prefer being able to keep the same email address over being able to store lots of email. Hmm, someone should run some user studies to find out . . .
Ah, that's because Extreme Blue wasn't around back then. They try very hard to get interesting projects for teams of four interns (three technical and one mba student) to work on during the summer. The mentors of each project hand pick the students working for them and are good at providing feedback during the whole summer.
Also, not all the projects are as exciting as Game Grid. For example, I was working a few cubicles down from the Game Grid guys on a project for automatically generating high level UML diagrams from source code. Not really that exciting.
Exactly. That is part of the business plan that Fred, the MBA student, came up with. Since it is hard for game developers to know how popular an online game is, this allows them to start with a small number of server and incrementally add them as popularity for the game increases. As the game ages and the number of players drop, you can remove servers from the grid and optimal grid should redistribute the load over the remaining servers.
At least that's the way that Matt and John (the two main developers) explained it to me (I also worked at Almaden for Extreme Blue this summer).
Yeah, that's the problem. Except there is no farmer and the restriction on what animals can be left alone together only applied to the boat (so you could lave a bad combination on either shore).
Oh, BTW, you get 8 seconds for your solution to run, so brute forcing all combinations would take way too long. In more concrete terms, this means you want something with a time complexity less than about 50 million.
Actually, you're right, these problems weren't that hard. In fact, three of the four finalists finished all the problems in about 40 minutes.
There was actually a problem (a switch died, then the backup switch died) during the final round and they had to cancel the match. The question here are actually a second batch of problems.
The hard problem from the first back was a get the animals across the river problem. Given a set of up to 16 animals and what animals can't be placed on a boat together, find the minimum number of trips it takes to get all the animals across the river. Oh yeah, the animals also have weights and if the weight of the animals on the boat exceeds a certain threashold, you can't transport them.
When are they goining to start teach good coding practices in school?
They try to, but there just isn't enough time. Really, most after you take data structures (maybe a sophmore level class) you never get any formal programming training. Instead you move on to more specialized stuff like graphics or AI or theory or compilers or whatever.
And really, should the university be responsible for teaching you that stuff? In my experience, the best way to become a better programmer is to program and have other (more experience) people examine your code and give you feedback, and to look and learn from other people's code. If you're smart, you learn very quickly how to program for "the real world" when put in a job environment.
Did you read why C++ is his language of choice? The reason he gives is because it's the language he has the most experience in. In fact, most of top ranked competitors use C++ (you have a choice between C++, C# and Java).
My theory on this isn't that most of them think that C++ is a better language, it's just that most of the top competitors went through school when C++ or C was being taught so they know it the best. Most (but not all) of the top ranked coders are at the ends of their undergraduate careers or older.
Mundane problems? Topcoder problems are much more interesting than say, laying out a GUI for your application or programming some design specs that your boss created.
Most people I know who compete in Topcoder do it because their day job or their classes don't provide interesting problems. Topcoder contests are fun to compete in. Have you tried competing before? You might find out you enjoy it. The next single round match is next Thurday.
A key feature of any episode of Sailor Moon is transformation. Choose one morphing scene from any episode or film version of Sailor Moon. Describe in concrete terms how the animators render this transformation in time and space.... We want to emphasize that there is no necessarily correct answer for this topic; the success of your paper will lie in its specificity in analyzing the work of the animators, and the argument you mount---no matter how speculative---concerning the relationship of the animation and its probable viewers....
Hmm, let me guess what the teenage boy viewers are thinking when they watch these transformation . ..
Anyway, it would be a fun paper to write. Although, if I were teaching the course, I would open it up to a transformation sequence from any magical girl anime (Hime-chan's Ribbon, Card Captor Sakura, Saint Tail, Devil Hunter Yohko, etc). It might also be interesting to speculate about why animators decide to use the transformations with such repetition. Is it simply to reduce the amount of new animation per episode or do they think it provides continuity between episodes?
When you look at results, most of the prestigious schools are defeated, beaten down, and put to shame by a relatively unknown class of schools, the small liberal-arts college.
I find this very interesting. I'm currently a CS graduate student at one of the top schools and I came from a medium sized liberal arts school. What I've found after one semester is that although I didn't take as many CS courses during my undergrad (like algorithms, AI, or compilers), after a slow start at the beginning of the semester, I've ended the semester with better grades than many of my peers. In fact, I am getting better grades in graduate school than I did at my undergrad, even though my undergrad is less prestigious. Hell, my undergrad degree wasn't even in computer science, it was in systems analysis (CS wasn't offered as a major until after I started school).
People make fun of liberal arts education saying that you don't learn anything applicable to the real world. Sometimes, this is true. One of the difficulties with a liberal arts education is that you have to believe in it for it to work. I know many students who took the easy classes to fulfill requirements outside of their major. If you do that, a liberal arts education won't work. You have to push yourself in other disciplines and open up to alternate ways of looking at problems. It's through attacking a variety of problems from many angles that makes real thinkers.
One of my main regrets of my undergrad is that I didn't realize this until the end of my second year. If I had know this when I was applying to college, I would have applied to smaller schools (or interdisciplinary programs) and put much more thought into which classes I took my first two years.
Canon S110 digital camera (digital elph): It's in a small pouch attached to the shoulder strap of my laptop bag
Nokia 3360 cellphone: I don't carry this as often, since I don't like cellphones, but if I'm carrying it, it's in the interior jacket pocket.
Panasonic CD player: I have a little cd carrying bag that I sometimes lug around with me if it's a long walk to where I'm going.
Yeah, I like my toys to be small.
Well, my big problem with newer gadgets is that people seem to care more about extra features rather than making them smaller. I have no interest in a PDA that can play MP3s or has 64MB of memory. On the other hand, if you can shrink one down to just the size of the screen (plus a small border) and make them half an inch thick, I'd buy it in a heartbeat. Also, make more small phones without movable parts. I don't want to waste my time pulling out an antenna or flipping open my phone. And stop putting features in my phone! I don't need an MP3 player in my phone.
Actually, Namco has a virtual sword fighting game called Mazan : Flash Of The Blade. It's not force feedback, but you get this stub of a sword and you swing it at bad guys on the screen. It's pretty neat to watch.
As for arcade games having tough times, Namco and Konami are keeping them alive by offering games that aren't quite as good on consoles/PCs as in the arcade. Examples of games like this are Dance Dance Revolution (unless you build your own hard pad, it's not the same as the arcade), Percussion Freaks (play drums, like DDR except with a drum set), and Para Para Dancing (wave your arms around). Yes, arcades aren't as popular as they used to be, but that doesn't mean the arcade is dead yet or that they're crappy.
Re:Linux for desktop, *BSD for servers?
on
FreeBSD 4.6
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Actually, I use FreeBSD for both desktop and server. I admit that I originally made this decision based on my familiarity with FreeBSD and I was a bit apprehensive, but I've found it to be just as good for everything I do. My original concern was hardware support (getting XFree86 4.x to work properly and firewire support), but it hasn't been a problem. Over the past couple weeks, I've successfully installed one of the 4.6 pre-releases on my laptop, including the firewire cd-rom drive and internal wireless card. Tangentially, I must say that networking with FreeBSD is incredibly easy, I was amazed at how little effort it took to get the wireless card up and running.
I think FreeBSD works fine on the desktop, but then again, I don't really play games. I use all the same software as linux folks such as galeon, gaim, enlightenment, kde, etc
Heh, fortunately, upgrading FreeBSD is pretty painless (at least, in my experience). Simply upgrade the source code in/usr/src (I recommend using CVSUP), then type "make buildworld && make installworld" while in/usr/src.
More detailed instructions can be found in the handbook.
The problem with LiteStep is that it has a fairly steep learning curve.
You're absolutely right, the learning curve of Litestep is pretty rough. It's definitely been made with the same mentality of most *nix programs, almost everything is configured in a plain text file and you have to wade through documentation (which can be pretty sparse at times) trying to figure out how to get things to work.
That being said, I think Litestep is a good place to start because it has a very active, strong, supportive community. #litestep on Efnet has many regulars that can help you with your first Litestep installation. LS Docs has the docs for the core modules. Also, emailing module authors directly or using the litestep mailing list is also a good way to get feedback.
What makes litestep better than other shells? I would say it's users who care about litestep.
''This is a sociological problem and we have got to work it out,'' adds Galuten. ''I find it incredibly ironic that some people will spend an extra $1,000 on their hard drives just so they can store more music, but they won't pay for the music.''
So let's think about this. According to Pricewatch, a 160GB hdd is only 193$ + 15$ s&h. So let's round up and say it's 250$ for 160GB, so for 1000$ I could get 640GB of storage. Let's assume that the average CD is about 115MB (60 minutes at 256kbps quality MP3). So with 640GB of storage, I could store 5565 full albums. So if I were to buy CDs to equal these 5565 albums, I would have to pay about 18 cents a CD to pay less than I did for the hard drives. So paying 1000$ for hard drives seems to be a much more economical decision.
Also, I can use hard drives for things other than music. They're a much more versitile investment than a music CD.
I agree, these are things that are part of life ten years ago. And further back in time people were late because weather was too hazardous to travel through, people would go to bed early because the sun went down and people would find joy in receiving a letter from a friend once every two weeks.
And as new technology develops, a lot of these quirks of life are removed, but I assure you, new ones take their place. I may not forget to tape my favorite show because of a Tivo, but I may not be able to read my email because my ISP is having difficulties. My alarm clock may reduce the number of times I oversleep, but I may miss my video conference because my operating system is having one of those days.
The introduction of new technologies is changing life, and I find it quite fun: my life is constantly changing because of it. It's pretty exciting (and still quite annoying), and I like it.
I don't think I can put a value judgement on these changes in life, it's just different.
A better idea would be to use the site as a testing ground for new commercials. Let the users watch and rate the clips in the same way as test screenings are used for movies. A service like that could be very valuable for the advertising industry.
Although I wonder how useful this would be. I don't imagine that the type of people who would take the time to view pilot commercials on line and rate them for free would be representative of the TV viewing population as a whole. This might work with for technology related commercials, but I don't think the data would be useful to the advertising industry as a whole.
So, I'm about to graduate and get my undergraduate degree in computer science and I thought that a nice graduation present would be a laptop. However, I'm torn between getting a Mac for the first time or sticking with a PC. Here are the reasons that I want to get a Mac:
* They're sexy. Apple's industrial design team is brilliant. The iBooks are small (very important) and stylish.
* OS X - FreeBSD is my OS of choice for servers so I see it as a major benefit that I can run (some) BSD applications on an iBook with no major problems. For example, XFree86 makes X11 forwarding over ssh very nice and stable.
* iPod - it's a sexy mp3 player and I want one (yes, I know there will probably be a good PC hack soon, but native compatability is comforting)
* Diversity of machines - I already have a desktop running Windows 2000 and another headless server running FreeBSD. I don't really need another Windows box or a FreeBSD box so having a Mac laptop allows me to run Mac software.
However, I'm still hesitent for the following reasons:
* only one mouse button - I know that's a silly reason, but I get confused about how to do things that require a second or a third mouse button on PCs
* learning curve - I spent about 90 minutes yesterday trying to get enlightenment to install on OS X yesterday. it would have been a simple "make && make compile" in FreeBSD.
* price - It seems that I get more bang for the buck with PCs. If nothing else, I can shop around for a PC and I have few choices with Macs.
So, I'm still undecided, but leaning towards buying a PC, mainly because of familiarity. Anyone have any suggestions?
No, I don't think that the ACM thinks that there is anything wrong with functional programming languages. However, it would be difficult to have the one set of problems and allow both functional languages and procedural languages. Some problems would benefit from one type of programming language. To provide consistency and make the contest more "fair," they only allow languages that are similar in power and usage.
Although you raise an interesting point: why isn't there a separate contest for functional languages? I think that would be equally interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
Some of the features of the Google Toolbar are a bit computationally expensive (although I'm surprised creating a new window is so slow). One thing you can do is to remove buttons that you're not using from the toolbar; they won't use any extra CPU that way. This can be done by going to View -> Toolbars -> Customize (or right click on the toolbar and select Customize). From there, drag away any buttons that you don't plan on using. Also, simply hiding the toolbar isn't sufficient, you need to remove it from the toolbar completely. I hope that helps speed up your browser.
I agree, public online applications shouldn't be used for sensitive data. That's why webnote is open sourced under the BSD license. If you want to make private notes or have something that you're locally accountable for, you can run it on your own server and use SSL or whatever.
Additionally, that's one of the reasons I provide an RSS feed. You can easily save a local backup of your notes.
Tony
I've been playing around with the idea of a sticky-notes/post-it style app in a web browser using CSS and javascript (so it will work in IE 6+ and mozilla/firefox).
I call it webnote and anyone can play around with it. I mainly wanted something I could access anywhere but is a bit nicer than a plain text TODO file in my home directory (which is what I used to do). This is also easy to share with other people (partially because I haven't implemented any security yet).
I agree, right now gmail is in a testing stage. However, this makes me wonder why they're using an invite system to get new users. It seems like that would lead to an unrepresentative sampling of users that will test their system. That is, I bet most of the people who use gmail are more technically inclined that jane average email user who uses hotmail or yahoo mail. From a system standpoint, that may be a good test, but from a usability standpoint, that seems like a huge mistake. If they want people to test the system, they should come up with a way to get average people to use the system.
On a side note, I bet joe average email user doesn't care too much about having a gig of email. I bet they would prefer being able to keep the same email address over being able to store lots of email. Hmm, someone should run some user studies to find out . . .
Ah, that's because Extreme Blue wasn't around back then. They try very hard to get interesting projects for teams of four interns (three technical and one mba student) to work on during the summer. The mentors of each project hand pick the students working for them and are good at providing feedback during the whole summer.
Also, not all the projects are as exciting as Game Grid. For example, I was working a few cubicles down from the Game Grid guys on a project for automatically generating high level UML diagrams from source code. Not really that exciting.
This is an IBM project, it doesn't have anything to do with U Wisc. Two of the interns (Matt and John) just happened to be from U Wisc.
If you want to know more about the grid technology they used, Optimal Grid, you can get it at alphaWorks.
Exactly. That is part of the business plan that Fred, the MBA student, came up with. Since it is hard for game developers to know how popular an online game is, this allows them to start with a small number of server and incrementally add them as popularity for the game increases. As the game ages and the number of players drop, you can remove servers from the grid and optimal grid should redistribute the load over the remaining servers.
At least that's the way that Matt and John (the two main developers) explained it to me (I also worked at Almaden for Extreme Blue this summer).
Yeah, that's the problem. Except there is no farmer and the restriction on what animals can be left alone together only applied to the boat (so you could lave a bad combination on either shore).
Oh, BTW, you get 8 seconds for your solution to run, so brute forcing all combinations would take way too long. In more concrete terms, this means you want something with a time complexity less than about 50 million.
Actually, you're right, these problems weren't that hard. In fact, three of the four finalists finished all the problems in about 40 minutes.
There was actually a problem (a switch died, then the backup switch died) during the final round and they had to cancel the match. The question here are actually a second batch of problems.
The hard problem from the first back was a get the animals across the river problem. Given a set of up to 16 animals and what animals can't be placed on a boat together, find the minimum number of trips it takes to get all the animals across the river. Oh yeah, the animals also have weights and if the weight of the animals on the boat exceeds a certain threashold, you can't transport them.
And really, should the university be responsible for teaching you that stuff? In my experience, the best way to become a better programmer is to program and have other (more experience) people examine your code and give you feedback, and to look and learn from other people's code. If you're smart, you learn very quickly how to program for "the real world" when put in a job environment.
Did you read why C++ is his language of choice? The reason he gives is because it's the language he has the most experience in. In fact, most of top ranked competitors use C++ (you have a choice between C++, C# and Java). My theory on this isn't that most of them think that C++ is a better language, it's just that most of the top competitors went through school when C++ or C was being taught so they know it the best. Most (but not all) of the top ranked coders are at the ends of their undergraduate careers or older.
Mundane problems? Topcoder problems are much more interesting than say, laying out a GUI for your application or programming some design specs that your boss created. Most people I know who compete in Topcoder do it because their day job or their classes don't provide interesting problems. Topcoder contests are fun to compete in. Have you tried competing before? You might find out you enjoy it. The next single round match is next Thurday.
Anyway, it would be a fun paper to write. Although, if I were teaching the course, I would open it up to a transformation sequence from any magical girl anime (Hime-chan's Ribbon, Card Captor Sakura, Saint Tail, Devil Hunter Yohko, etc). It might also be interesting to speculate about why animators decide to use the transformations with such repetition. Is it simply to reduce the amount of new animation per episode or do they think it provides continuity between episodes?
People make fun of liberal arts education saying that you don't learn anything applicable to the real world. Sometimes, this is true. One of the difficulties with a liberal arts education is that you have to believe in it for it to work. I know many students who took the easy classes to fulfill requirements outside of their major. If you do that, a liberal arts education won't work. You have to push yourself in other disciplines and open up to alternate ways of looking at problems. It's through attacking a variety of problems from many angles that makes real thinkers.
One of my main regrets of my undergrad is that I didn't realize this until the end of my second year. If I had know this when I was applying to college, I would have applied to smaller schools (or interdisciplinary programs) and put much more thought into which classes I took my first two years.
I carry the following:
Palm IIIc: Front left pants pocket
Dell X200 Laptop: Ultra-portable laptop (12")-- I carry this in a RoadWired messenger bag which I take almost everywhere.
Canon S110 digital camera (digital elph): It's in a small pouch attached to the shoulder strap of my laptop bag
Nokia 3360 cellphone: I don't carry this as often, since I don't like cellphones, but if I'm carrying it, it's in the interior jacket pocket.
Panasonic CD player: I have a little cd carrying bag that I sometimes lug around with me if it's a long walk to where I'm going.
Yeah, I like my toys to be small.
Well, my big problem with newer gadgets is that people seem to care more about extra features rather than making them smaller. I have no interest in a PDA that can play MP3s or has 64MB of memory. On the other hand, if you can shrink one down to just the size of the screen (plus a small border) and make them half an inch thick, I'd buy it in a heartbeat. Also, make more small phones without movable parts. I don't want to waste my time pulling out an antenna or flipping open my phone. And stop putting features in my phone! I don't need an MP3 player in my phone.
I want small specialized products.
Actually, Namco has a virtual sword fighting game called Mazan : Flash Of The Blade. It's not force feedback, but you get this stub of a sword and you swing it at bad guys on the screen. It's pretty neat to watch.
As for arcade games having tough times, Namco and Konami are keeping them alive by offering games that aren't quite as good on consoles/PCs as in the arcade. Examples of games like this are Dance Dance Revolution (unless you build your own hard pad, it's not the same as the arcade), Percussion Freaks (play drums, like DDR except with a drum set), and Para Para Dancing (wave your arms around). Yes, arcades aren't as popular as they used to be, but that doesn't mean the arcade is dead yet or that they're crappy.
Actually, I use FreeBSD for both desktop and server. I admit that I originally made this decision based on my familiarity with FreeBSD and I was a bit apprehensive, but I've found it to be just as good for everything I do. My original concern was hardware support (getting XFree86 4.x to work properly and firewire support), but it hasn't been a problem. Over the past couple weeks, I've successfully installed one of the 4.6 pre-releases on my laptop, including the firewire cd-rom drive and internal wireless card. Tangentially, I must say that networking with FreeBSD is incredibly easy, I was amazed at how little effort it took to get the wireless card up and running.
I think FreeBSD works fine on the desktop, but then again, I don't really play games. I use all the same software as linux folks such as galeon, gaim, enlightenment, kde, etc
Heh, fortunately, upgrading FreeBSD is pretty painless (at least, in my experience). Simply upgrade the source code in /usr/src (I recommend using CVSUP), then type "make buildworld && make installworld" while in /usr/src.
More detailed instructions can be found in the handbook.
That being said, I think Litestep is a good place to start because it has a very active, strong, supportive community. #litestep on Efnet has many regulars that can help you with your first Litestep installation. LS Docs has the docs for the core modules. Also, emailing module authors directly or using the litestep mailing list is also a good way to get feedback.
What makes litestep better than other shells? I would say it's users who care about litestep.
So let's think about this. According to Pricewatch, a 160GB hdd is only 193$ + 15$ s&h. So let's round up and say it's 250$ for 160GB, so for 1000$ I could get 640GB of storage. Let's assume that the average CD is about 115MB (60 minutes at 256kbps quality MP3). So with 640GB of storage, I could store 5565 full albums. So if I were to buy CDs to equal these 5565 albums, I would have to pay about 18 cents a CD to pay less than I did for the hard drives. So paying 1000$ for hard drives seems to be a much more economical decision.
Also, I can use hard drives for things other than music. They're a much more versitile investment than a music CD.
And as new technology develops, a lot of these quirks of life are removed, but I assure you, new ones take their place. I may not forget to tape my favorite show because of a Tivo, but I may not be able to read my email because my ISP is having difficulties. My alarm clock may reduce the number of times I oversleep, but I may miss my video conference because my operating system is having one of those days.
The introduction of new technologies is changing life, and I find it quite fun: my life is constantly changing because of it. It's pretty exciting (and still quite annoying), and I like it.
I don't think I can put a value judgement on these changes in life, it's just different.
So, I'm about to graduate and get my undergraduate degree in computer science and I thought that a nice graduation present would be a laptop. However, I'm torn between getting a Mac for the first time or sticking with a PC. Here are the reasons that I want to get a Mac:
* They're sexy. Apple's industrial design team is brilliant. The iBooks are small (very important) and stylish.
* OS X - FreeBSD is my OS of choice for servers so I see it as a major benefit that I can run (some) BSD applications on an iBook with no major problems. For example, XFree86 makes X11 forwarding over ssh very nice and stable.
* iPod - it's a sexy mp3 player and I want one (yes, I know there will probably be a good PC hack soon, but native compatability is comforting)
* Diversity of machines - I already have a desktop running Windows 2000 and another headless server running FreeBSD. I don't really need another Windows box or a FreeBSD box so having a Mac laptop allows me to run Mac software.
However, I'm still hesitent for the following reasons:
* only one mouse button - I know that's a silly reason, but I get confused about how to do things that require a second or a third mouse button on PCs
* learning curve - I spent about 90 minutes yesterday trying to get enlightenment to install on OS X yesterday. it would have been a simple "make && make compile" in FreeBSD.
* price - It seems that I get more bang for the buck with PCs. If nothing else, I can shop around for a PC and I have few choices with Macs.
So, I'm still undecided, but leaning towards buying a PC, mainly because of familiarity. Anyone have any suggestions?
No, I don't think that the ACM thinks that there is anything wrong with functional programming languages. However, it would be difficult to have the one set of problems and allow both functional languages and procedural languages. Some problems would benefit from one type of programming language. To provide consistency and make the contest more "fair," they only allow languages that are similar in power and usage.
Although you raise an interesting point: why isn't there a separate contest for functional languages? I think that would be equally interesting.