You are correct, but "a lot" is not "most." Most of the compression comes from the redundancy. To be precise:
There are 26 characters, as you point out. On the other hand, as the grandparent poster points out, only 18 are used.
log2(18)=4.17 (to the largest hundredth)
So you only need 4.17 bits to represent 26 characters.
8 bits/4.7 bits = 1.9
So using a more compact bit-level representation of characters, you could achieve a compression ratio of 1:1.9. This would reduce the file from 68K to 36K.
The comment indicated final result was 12K. Reducing from 436K to 12K is a compression ratio of 1:3. The total compression ratio is 1:5.6
how does a young programmer make a name for himself at Google
How, then, did Isaac Newton make a name for himself? By standing on the shoulders of giants."
He had a host of mathematical notations (and if you think THAT'S nothing, try doing calculus using only words.) There were already techniques for finding what we would call the first derivative for most functions known at the time, as well as for finding the area under curves. The planets were already known to move in ellipses, and Galileo already had formulated (for objects on the earth) the acceleration of due to gravity.
You might as well ask how a young programmer makes a name for himself ANYWHERE, when he has compilers, libraries, optimizers, editors, development environments, revision control systems, etc. After all, the hard work is done for him . All a young programmer has to do is string together some statements that (let's be frank) are practically English.
To answer your questions, if everything assigned to you is already written, then you can get your work done REALLY fast. Perhaps you will become known as the guy who can do anything fast. You will be tasked with doing even more. Your familiarity with the code base will grow. When asked to do something taht would take others days, you will see clever ways to combine existing chunks of code. On your own time, you will be creating new and interesting things out of other people's code, things they didn't think of doing because they were thinking of something else.
And you're right, smart people don't wake up in the morning, chop down a tree, hew it into timbers, bind the timbers together, chop them into circles, and attach them to an oxcart. Smart tools build clockwork mechanisms containing dozens or hundreds of gears, wheels, cams, shafts, levers, and springs. And that's before breakfast.
Just curious - which peer-reviewed journals approved the scientific method? Or conjecture-proof? Or thesis, antithesis, and synthesis? I can't think of any other modes of inquiry that have nifty names, but you get the idea. Also, since when do books not engender debate? Did you miss out on the bit where peer-reviewed scientific journals show up a few hundred years after the printing press, which showed up a few millenia after scholarly writing?
And as long as we're engaging in ad hominems, Godel went insane, Einstein was a philanderer, and Heisenberg was a German.
I don't dispute your conclusion, by the way. I don't know Wolfram and haven't read his book. I merely dispute your lack of support for your statement. Which has nothing to do with the post you've replied to.
Legally, yes. Practically speaking, if your code becomes even mildly popular, you're begging for it to be forked. Nothing wrong with that; just the way it is.
The speed of light is constant. If you build a ruler that's 186 miles long, you will find that light takes.001 seconds to traverse it. Suppose that space expands by 1%. Your ruler is now 187.86 miles long, but you can't tell by measuring it with itself. Yet light will now take.00101 seconds to traverse the ruler.
By analogy, on your balloon, your ruler has inflated along with space, but it will now take a ladybug twice as long to walk from point A to point B.
I am no expert, either, and I don't know if what I say is true, but I do think it's possible for your analogy to be flawed.
You don't read his newsletters, do you. He DOES give ideas that he thinks will work. Schneier makes the point that what DOESN'T work is expecting any technology to make security easy. Anyone who accepts this flawed idea becomes a target for hackers (or terrorists). Schneier's idea for something that will work is HARD WORK coupled with INTELLIGENCE. After all, "security" really means "keeping people out." People are adaptive and intelligent. No security measure works forever.
Actually, the original form of Murphy's law was something along the lines of "If it is possible to connect it backwards, eventually some stupid technician will." This was generalized into "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong." The final word "eventually" was merely implied and not generally understood.
I have always been more impressed with a variant of Murphy's law that I attribute to Douglas Adams, but he didn't spell it out explicitly. "Anything that CAN'T go wrong is impossible to fix when it DOES go wrong." I first became convinced of the absolute truth of this when dealing with Plug'n'Play in Windows 95.
For instance, who thinks about the 8 parts of your mouth when brushing you teeth
Two kinds of people come immediately to mind:
(1) People with more spare CPU cycles than you have. When faced with a mindless task, their mind tends to wander. You would appear to be one of those herd members who can, at will, think about nothing.
(2) People with better hygiene than you have. Brushing your teeth the way that dentists recommend, the way that minimizes the chance of tooth decay, requires attention to detail. Do you brush the surface of your molars? The gumline? The incisors and canines?
Because if you don't take the call, you won't talk. If you don't talk, you're not spending minutes connected. If you're not spending minutes connected, your service provider has no chances of making indecent profits.
Whenever you wonder about why something isn't done, ask yourself where the money is. It never fails.
Social security is in no way, shape, or form shielded in any legal sense. It is not founded on a constitutional amendment. It could be eliminated TOMORROW by a simple majority in two houses.
It is shielded solely by the will of the people. If the people are convinced to due the will of GW Bush, then it will be done.
And there IS NO SS TRUST FUND. That's an accounting fiction. If you believe in the trust fund, then I can make you a millionaire in one easy step:
1. Write yourself a check for one million dollars and one cent.
There, you now have assets totally more than one million dollars. You are a millionaire in the exact same sense that the social security trust fund exists.
Since about 20 years of Democratic leadership in the Congress. Guess you haven't been around long enough to remember when fiscal responsibility was a Republican battle cry. It is very odd to me to see fiscal conservativism become a Democratic party political plank.
So your theory is that the OC is the ONLY show on Fox? No, I think the original poster was correct in assuming the target demographics had been carefully calculated...much to the chagrin of the True Fans (tm).
And you further assume that George Lucas has NO POWER? I find your lack of faith...disturbing.
We didn't get the "surpluses" (if you can call $200 billion a surplus when it sits under a $5 trillion debt) until after he'd cut welfare. Granted, he cut other things as well. My point is your second sentence: Clinton didn't have to cut welfare. In fact, had the previous 12 years of Republican administrations not run the debt up to record levels, it never would have occurred to him to cut welfare.
Lately, just about every Republican in office is for "Don't Tax, But Spend Just As Much As If We Were". Of course. You understand the reasoning behind this, don't you?
As a Republican, you should go kick your party in the goods for being so completely irresponsible Ah. I guess you don't.
Hopefully people can discuss this without getting their panties in a bunch I don't think you're going to get what you hoped for after I finish...
Ask yourself ONE question: Which presidential party slashed welfare? Ok, TWO questions: Which presidential party ran up such a high debt that entitlements HAD to be cut?
Do you see the strategy yet? Just in case not, I'll spell it out. The Republicans, under Ronald Reagan (who popularized the phrase "welfare queen") ran up a HUGE debt. The Democrats, under Bill Clinton, HAD to cut something. Welfare, a popular Republican target, and a popular Democratic program, got cut.
Now the Republicans, under George Bush, continue to run up a huge debt while popularizing the notion that Social Security is dying. The Republicans have NEVER been supporters of social securty.
Guess what will happen next? If your panties aren't in a bunch yet, then you're not paying attention.
Let me sum up: The Republicans are EVIL. They run up a HUGE debt so that something has to be cut from the budget. The Democrats are STUPID. They cut their own social programs.
THAT, I believe, is the unspoken plan of the Republicans. If you ignore their words and observe their actions, it's the only thing that makes sense.
Kennedy didn't "game the system". He used it the way it was meant to be used. Poor people might try to game the system, but rich men simply use the system as-is.
Perhaps you were unaware that "the system", for all of human history, has been created by wealthy rulers for the benefit of wealthy rulers? Instances where this appeared not to be true were merely brief transitional periods between differing sets of wealthy rulers.
To be precise, cartels only work when consumers PERCEIVE that they can't "do without". Most American consumers can't distinguish between wants and needs.
Where is the line between reasonable and unreasonable?
Precisely. This is why our legal system includes JUDGES. All actions cannot be boiled down to a set of rules that decide permissible/non-permissible. (Kurt Godel proved that.) At some point, a judge steps in and makes a decision as to which of two conflicting legal theories applies.
If all solid objects are rendered as sets of triangles, it is conceptually simple to have the physics engine report back which triangles are intersecting each other. Ideally the engine is sophisticated enough to report when a triangle from set A intersects with a triangle from set B (where A and B might be the set of triangles that make up a player and the set of triangles that make up a rocket, respectively).
Determining the effect of instant shot weapons is easy enough also; if all three vertexes of a "triangle" are on the same line, the "triangle" is a line. Instead of bullets, you "draw" an invisible "triangle" in the direction the gun is pointing and see if it intersects with anything interesting.
If two sets of triangles intersect, the software can determine what should happen, but the hard part, computationally, is figuring out when those intersections occur.
When was the last time you saw a bank robbed by a 7.62mm fully-automatic belt-fed tripod-mounted machine gun? Or with a disposable 3.5mm shaped-charge rocket launcher? Or a tracked turreted armored vehicle?
Don't confuse the efforts of the liberal weenies to outlaw guns altogether (NEVER going to happen) with the entirely effective gun control tha the US government engages in. In case you hadn't noticed, when the ATF thinks people are violating the REAL gun control laws, the ATF takes their guns away or they kill them. Or both. You may disagree with the methods and philosophy of the ATF, but they effectively enforce gun control laws.
Ummm...yeah. Perhaps you missed out on the last 25 years in computer history, but ever since the introduction of the "IBM PC", the term "PC" has meant a descendant of that original hardware. Apple rather famously did not make PCs. They made Macs. (Remember 1984?) Windows has nothing to do with it; for the first few years of the PC, Windows didn't exist.
If the grandparent post had said "computers" then your post would have been entirely reasonable, but the Apple Macintosh has NEVER been a PC. Personal computer? Sure. PC? Absolutely not.
Mr. Citron does not want VoIP to be regulated in the same way that old-fashoined phone companies are. The FCC's regulation of phone companies is based on the copncept of a company selling access to physical wires. That company generally monopolizes the area that they serve, in the sense that no one else owns phone cables that go to the house. The company is required to contribute funds to a government program that subsidizes the company's services in parts of the country where the company can't make a profit (rural telephony, in other words).
Slashdot Mirror
You are correct, but "a lot" is not "most." Most of the compression comes from the redundancy. To be precise:
There are 26 characters, as you point out. On the other hand, as the grandparent poster points out, only 18 are used.
log2(18)=4.17 (to the largest hundredth)
So you only need 4.17 bits to represent 26 characters.
8 bits/4.7 bits = 1.9
So using a more compact bit-level representation of characters, you could achieve a compression ratio of 1:1.9. This would reduce the file from 68K to 36K.
The comment indicated final result was 12K. Reducing from 436K to 12K is a compression ratio of 1:3. The total compression ratio is 1:5.6
Guess I don't have enough to do today...
how does a young programmer make a name for himself at Google
How, then, did Isaac Newton make a name for himself? By standing on the shoulders of giants."
He had a host of mathematical notations (and if you think THAT'S nothing, try doing calculus using only words.) There were already techniques for finding what we would call the first derivative for most functions known at the time, as well as for finding the area under curves. The planets were already known to move in ellipses, and Galileo already had formulated (for objects on the earth) the acceleration of due to gravity.
You might as well ask how a young programmer makes a name for himself ANYWHERE, when he has compilers, libraries, optimizers, editors, development environments, revision control systems, etc. After all, the hard work is done for him . All a young programmer has to do is string together some statements that (let's be frank) are practically English.
To answer your questions, if everything assigned to you is already written, then you can get your work done REALLY fast. Perhaps you will become known as the guy who can do anything fast. You will be tasked with doing even more. Your familiarity with the code base will grow. When asked to do something taht would take others days, you will see clever ways to combine existing chunks of code. On your own time, you will be creating new and interesting things out of other people's code, things they didn't think of doing because they were thinking of something else.
And you're right, smart people don't wake up in the morning, chop down a tree, hew it into timbers, bind the timbers together, chop them into circles, and attach them to an oxcart. Smart tools build clockwork mechanisms containing dozens or hundreds of gears, wheels, cams, shafts, levers, and springs. And that's before breakfast.
Just curious - which peer-reviewed journals approved the scientific method? Or conjecture-proof? Or thesis, antithesis, and synthesis? I can't think of any other modes of inquiry that have nifty names, but you get the idea. Also, since when do books not engender debate? Did you miss out on the bit where peer-reviewed scientific journals show up a few hundred years after the printing press, which showed up a few millenia after scholarly writing?
And as long as we're engaging in ad hominems, Godel went insane, Einstein was a philanderer, and Heisenberg was a German.
I don't dispute your conclusion, by the way. I don't know Wolfram and haven't read his book. I merely dispute your lack of support for your statement. Which has nothing to do with the post you've replied to.
Legally, yes. Practically speaking, if your code becomes even mildly popular, you're begging for it to be forked. Nothing wrong with that; just the way it is.
The speed of light is constant. If you build a ruler that's 186 miles long, you will find that light takes .001 seconds to traverse it. Suppose that space expands by 1%. Your ruler is now 187.86 miles long, but you can't tell by measuring it with itself. Yet light will now take .00101 seconds to traverse the ruler.
By analogy, on your balloon, your ruler has inflated along with space, but it will now take a ladybug twice as long to walk from point A to point B.
I am no expert, either, and I don't know if what I say is true, but I do think it's possible for your analogy to be flawed.
Pfft. I was scoffing at people back when EnsgnTaco was running the place.
Imagine! In Soviet Russia, for one, Beowulf cluster of Chewbacca-defending overlords welcome YOU - FOR GREAT JUSTICE!
(This post goes to 11)
You don't read his newsletters, do you. He DOES give ideas that he thinks will work. Schneier makes the point that what DOESN'T work is expecting any technology to make security easy. Anyone who accepts this flawed idea becomes a target for hackers (or terrorists). Schneier's idea for something that will work is HARD WORK coupled with INTELLIGENCE. After all, "security" really means "keeping people out." People are adaptive and intelligent. No security measure works forever.
Actually, the original form of Murphy's law was something along the lines of "If it is possible to connect it backwards, eventually some stupid technician will." This was generalized into "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong." The final word "eventually" was merely implied and not generally understood.
I have always been more impressed with a variant of Murphy's law that I attribute to Douglas Adams, but he didn't spell it out explicitly. "Anything that CAN'T go wrong is impossible to fix when it DOES go wrong." I first became convinced of the absolute truth of this when dealing with Plug'n'Play in Windows 95.
Imagine the tension he felt, after he muddied his child's hand and said "You can never wash again."
For instance, who thinks about the 8 parts of your mouth when brushing you teeth
Two kinds of people come immediately to mind:
(1) People with more spare CPU cycles than you have. When faced with a mindless task, their mind tends to wander. You would appear to be one of those herd members who can, at will, think about nothing.
(2) People with better hygiene than you have. Brushing your teeth the way that dentists recommend, the way that minimizes the chance of tooth decay, requires attention to detail. Do you brush the surface of your molars? The gumline? The incisors and canines?
Because if you don't take the call, you won't talk. If you don't talk, you're not spending minutes connected. If you're not spending minutes connected, your service provider has no chances of making indecent profits.
Whenever you wonder about why something isn't done, ask yourself where the money is. It never fails.
Do they bother you? Then desolder them.
Social security is in no way, shape, or form shielded in any legal sense. It is not founded on a constitutional amendment. It could be eliminated TOMORROW by a simple majority in two houses.
It is shielded solely by the will of the people. If the people are convinced to due the will of GW Bush, then it will be done.
And there IS NO SS TRUST FUND. That's an accounting fiction. If you believe in the trust fund, then I can make you a millionaire in one easy step:
1. Write yourself a check for one million dollars and one cent.
There, you now have assets totally more than one million dollars. You are a millionaire in the exact same sense that the social security trust fund exists.
Since about 20 years of Democratic leadership in the Congress. Guess you haven't been around long enough to remember when fiscal responsibility was a Republican battle cry. It is very odd to me to see fiscal conservativism become a Democratic party political plank.
So your theory is that the OC is the ONLY show on Fox? No, I think the original poster was correct in assuming the target demographics had been carefully calculated...much to the chagrin of the True Fans (tm).
And you further assume that George Lucas has NO POWER? I find your lack of faith...disturbing.
We didn't get the "surpluses" (if you can call $200 billion a surplus when it sits under a $5 trillion debt) until after he'd cut welfare. Granted, he cut other things as well. My point is your second sentence: Clinton didn't have to cut welfare. In fact, had the previous 12 years of Republican administrations not run the debt up to record levels, it never would have occurred to him to cut welfare.
Clinton was indeed a fiscal conservative.
Lately, just about every Republican in office is for "Don't Tax, But Spend Just As Much As If We Were".
Of course. You understand the reasoning behind this, don't you?
As a Republican, you should go kick your party in the goods for being so completely irresponsible
Ah. I guess you don't.
Hopefully people can discuss this without getting their panties in a bunch
I don't think you're going to get what you hoped for after I finish...
Ask yourself ONE question: Which presidential party slashed welfare? Ok, TWO questions: Which presidential party ran up such a high debt that entitlements HAD to be cut?
Do you see the strategy yet? Just in case not, I'll spell it out. The Republicans, under Ronald Reagan (who popularized the phrase "welfare queen") ran up a HUGE debt. The Democrats, under Bill Clinton, HAD to cut something. Welfare, a popular Republican target, and a popular Democratic program, got cut.
Now the Republicans, under George Bush, continue to run up a huge debt while popularizing the notion that Social Security is dying. The Republicans have NEVER been supporters of social securty.
Guess what will happen next? If your panties aren't in a bunch yet, then you're not paying attention.
Let me sum up: The Republicans are EVIL. They run up a HUGE debt so that something has to be cut from the budget. The Democrats are STUPID. They cut their own social programs.
THAT, I believe, is the unspoken plan of the Republicans. If you ignore their words and observe their actions, it's the only thing that makes sense.
Kennedy didn't "game the system". He used it the way it was meant to be used. Poor people might try to game the system, but rich men simply use the system as-is.
Perhaps you were unaware that "the system", for all of human history, has been created by wealthy rulers for the benefit of wealthy rulers? Instances where this appeared not to be true were merely brief transitional periods between differing sets of wealthy rulers.
To be precise, cartels only work when consumers PERCEIVE that they can't "do without". Most American consumers can't distinguish between wants and needs.
Where is the line between reasonable and unreasonable?
Precisely. This is why our legal system includes JUDGES. All actions cannot be boiled down to a set of rules that decide permissible/non-permissible. (Kurt Godel proved that.) At some point, a judge steps in and makes a decision as to which of two conflicting legal theories applies.
Physics processing boils down to one thing:
INTERSECTIONS (sometimes known as collisions)
If all solid objects are rendered as sets of triangles, it is conceptually simple to have the physics engine report back which triangles are intersecting each other. Ideally the engine is sophisticated enough to report when a triangle from set A intersects with a triangle from set B (where A and B might be the set of triangles that make up a player and the set of triangles that make up a rocket, respectively).
Determining the effect of instant shot weapons is easy enough also; if all three vertexes of a "triangle" are on the same line, the "triangle" is a line. Instead of bullets, you "draw" an invisible "triangle" in the direction the gun is pointing and see if it intersects with anything interesting.
If two sets of triangles intersect, the software can determine what should happen, but the hard part, computationally, is figuring out when those intersections occur.
Gun control doesn't work?
When was the last time you saw a bank robbed by a 7.62mm fully-automatic belt-fed tripod-mounted machine gun? Or with a disposable 3.5mm shaped-charge rocket launcher? Or a tracked turreted armored vehicle?
Don't confuse the efforts of the liberal weenies to outlaw guns altogether (NEVER going to happen) with the entirely effective gun control tha the US government engages in. In case you hadn't noticed, when the ATF thinks people are violating the REAL gun control laws, the ATF takes their guns away or they kill them. Or both. You may disagree with the methods and philosophy of the ATF, but they effectively enforce gun control laws.
Ummm...yeah. Perhaps you missed out on the last 25 years in computer history, but ever since the introduction of the "IBM PC", the term "PC" has meant a descendant of that original hardware. Apple rather famously did not make PCs. They made Macs. (Remember 1984?) Windows has nothing to do with it; for the first few years of the PC, Windows didn't exist.
If the grandparent post had said "computers" then your post would have been entirely reasonable, but the Apple Macintosh has NEVER been a PC. Personal computer? Sure. PC? Absolutely not.
Mr. Citron does not want VoIP to be regulated in the same way that old-fashoined phone companies are. The FCC's regulation of phone companies is based on the copncept of a company selling access to physical wires. That company generally monopolizes the area that they serve, in the sense that no one else owns phone cables that go to the house. The company is required to contribute funds to a government program that subsidizes the company's services in parts of the country where the company can't make a profit (rural telephony, in other words).