This is actually the opposite of something that's wrong with a company. They used the money that they had in order to fund research in order to produce a better product, and somewhat simply to do new and interesting research. I can't see why you would think that this is a bad thing.
People cite the "nimble" bit when they mean that a company is stuck in its ways or unable to adapt to change. Doing major research and development is the opposite of that. It's where people who are experts in a field use their talents to really thoroughly explore new ideas.
Moreover, your assertion lies on the idea that, somehow, this research isn't paying off. The consequence of that would be that they somehow fail to make money on the XBox One. It's a little early to be calling the XBox One a commercial failure, given that it won't be.
There's a chapter that discusses North Korea's program for dealing with POWs during the Korean War. It was astonishingly effective, and, at least the parts in the book, didn't seem to involve much torture.
Honestly, Slashdot has been one of my favorite websites ever since it was shown to me in high school. Within a year or two after I started reading Slashdot, it became *the* place to become "in the know" with what was going on in technology.
A big part of the direction that Slashdot has moved in has been a product of this. More and more people knew that Slashdot was a place to go to to get "in the know," but the pool of truly enthusiastic, sharp, science and engineering minded people became diluted with people who simply wanted to be associated with that. Everyone wanted to participate, and the signal to noise ratio went down. It's unfortunate, but the thing that initially attracted people here was largely due to your vision and your efforts. I don't believe that your departure is likely to improve the site. I know that I, at times, have been critical of the direction that Slashdot has gone in (and at times you have expressed frustrations with the site yourself, or at least, frustrations with what you should do with it), but this change in direction has largely been a product of the change in readership. It has been your vision that has managed to keep it sane.
What is truly unfortunate is that, looking around the Internet for a site that gives me the same enjoyment that Slashdot did in its heyday, I have come up empty-handed. It really does feel like there is nowhere online for the old-school geek anymore. Everyone wants to be part of that now. In fact, being a "hipster" now involves saying how geeky and quirky you are. It's pretty annoying seeing kids who can't even program move in on my turf like that.
Anyway, thanks for all of the effort that you've put into this site, and I honestly do hope that we meet at an Open Source convention of some sort someday. If we do, I'll buy you a beer.
You know, I just shouldn't have chimed in. I'm beginning to regret that I did.
Thank you for speaking down to me. Now, lets get to business.
I get it. I actually understand computational complexity very well. Had you read the follow-up post, which was posted well before your post, you would see that I added the caveat "if P!=NP", long before you had a chance to talk down to me.
I actually threw in the caveat in a follow-up post (since I wasn't very atomic about it) that this was if P!=NP. Nothing that I said affects class inclusions once that caveat is thrown in.
I should caveat all of this. The "no polynomial-time algorithm" bit is only true if P!=NP. If P=NP, then there is a deterministic polynomial-time algorithm for NP-Complete problems. NP-Hard, however, just means that it's at least as hard as NP, so, it's possible that there's no algorithm for that harder problem. You have to be really really precise when talking about this stuff.
Since I had to suffer through at least one professor who didn't understand basic complexity theory last night, and I know that Slashdot generally screws it up to.
NP-Hard means that there's no (deterministic) polynomial-time algorithm to solve the games. Additionally, you always have to generalize these games in order to make that claim. Since computational complexity is defined in terms of the length of the input, and certainly all of these games are being played on an input of fixed length.
However, there are effective approaches to solving NP-Hard problems. There are solvers for known NP-Hard problems. If you Google "sat solver" you'll find at least 5 that you can just download. SAT solvers are used in VLSI validation and other practical things. These solvers use heuristics to improve search performance, generally proposing answers and checking them (for NP-Complete problems).
Also, there are tons of games known to be NP or PSPACE complete. The reductions for those games are kind of a standard problem, since the AI community writes a bunch of these solvers.
I was about to say something similar, albeit, perhaps less derisively. I haven't tried Cyber Clean, but it seems like a great product. If it's at ThinkGeek, I'll have to throw it in with my next order of energy drinks.
You mean that foreign intelligence agencies might suddenly become suspicious that something secret is going on when a group of black SUVs show up at a construction site?
I think that work experience is quite important, but a masters degree is generally a 1 year or 6 month add-on, depending on the route that you go. Nobody reading your resume is going to care about 1 year of work experience.
Also, at many companies the IT and programming staff are two different groups entirely. I'm a PhD student, but I have friends from my masters program who started out with 6 figure salaries. Though this is not the norm, most of them did start out in the high 5 figure range.
Did anybody else read this and think of 2010: The Year We Make Contact. Obviously the movie version, not the book.
"All these toilets are yours except the ones on Europa..."
(For those who haven't seen both, the movie and the book differ significantly. In the book, the Russians are our friends, and we're on a space mission together. In the movie, they're our enemies, but we're still on a space mission together.)
It's also worth mentioning that they're worried about their ideas being stolen during the course of undergraduate computer science education.
The situation comes up in research situations... but doesn't really happen when you're banging out your homework.
But, to the original poster. I'm sure you'll do great things down the road... but this really applies more to research and perhaps things like senior projects than your situation.
Re:1000 mph speed, 100 gallons per mile efficiency
on
1000-mph Car Planned
·
· Score: 1
Indeed. I was just thinking that I'd really like to see a separate speed record for the fastest car that moves by spinning it's wheels.
"Also, I notice - they're the last to switch their lights on when it starts to get dark - or when there's fog/spray on the motorways."
Most of the more expensive automobiles turn their lights on and off automatically. As an anecdote, I noticed in myself that this put me into the habit of waiting for the car to adjust the lighting itself.
I saw a lot of comments on this and thought that I'd chime in.
Here's the idea.
If you have a fisheye lens, that lens normally projects onto a flat CCD which is used to take the picture. That picture is distorted when it hits the lens. If you want to flatten the picture, you can do so by modeling the distortion imposed on the image by the lens, then inverting that distortion. This is a common practice in computer vision applications.
If we're to look at this model, it becomes readily apparent that some sections of this undistorted image will have lower resolution than others because certain pixels will represent a much larger area on the surface of the lens. The mapping between the square CCD and the curved lens is not one-to-one.
If we're to use a curved CCD, we can raise the resolution of the image by distributing the receivers in the grid such that this mapping is closer to one-to-one (or perhaps exactly one-to-one).
Then, we just do the same undistortion process again in order to flatten out the image, this time taking into account the curvature of the CCD, however, if you read through the math, it becomes apparent that the model should be identical if the CCD lines up perfectly behind the lens, and only slightly different if it does not.
Slashdot Mirror
They *did* invest in the Kinect 2. The Kinect 2 has also been a major success.
This is actually the opposite of something that's wrong with a company. They used the money that they had in order to fund research in order to produce a better product, and somewhat simply to do new and interesting research. I can't see why you would think that this is a bad thing.
People cite the "nimble" bit when they mean that a company is stuck in its ways or unable to adapt to change. Doing major research and development is the opposite of that. It's where people who are experts in a field use their talents to really thoroughly explore new ideas.
Moreover, your assertion lies on the idea that, somehow, this research isn't paying off. The consequence of that would be that they somehow fail to make money on the XBox One. It's a little early to be calling the XBox One a commercial failure, given that it won't be.
The FBI should just pick up this book: http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Business-Essentials/dp/006124189X
There's a chapter that discusses North Korea's program for dealing with POWs during the Korean War. It was astonishingly effective, and, at least the parts in the book, didn't seem to involve much torture.
Honestly, Slashdot has been one of my favorite websites ever since it was shown to me in high school. Within a year or two after I started reading Slashdot, it became *the* place to become "in the know" with what was going on in technology.
A big part of the direction that Slashdot has moved in has been a product of this. More and more people knew that Slashdot was a place to go to to get "in the know," but the pool of truly enthusiastic, sharp, science and engineering minded people became diluted with people who simply wanted to be associated with that. Everyone wanted to participate, and the signal to noise ratio went down. It's unfortunate, but the thing that initially attracted people here was largely due to your vision and your efforts. I don't believe that your departure is likely to improve the site. I know that I, at times, have been critical of the direction that Slashdot has gone in (and at times you have expressed frustrations with the site yourself, or at least, frustrations with what you should do with it), but this change in direction has largely been a product of the change in readership. It has been your vision that has managed to keep it sane.
What is truly unfortunate is that, looking around the Internet for a site that gives me the same enjoyment that Slashdot did in its heyday, I have come up empty-handed. It really does feel like there is nowhere online for the old-school geek anymore. Everyone wants to be part of that now. In fact, being a "hipster" now involves saying how geeky and quirky you are. It's pretty annoying seeing kids who can't even program move in on my turf like that.
Anyway, thanks for all of the effort that you've put into this site, and I honestly do hope that we meet at an Open Source convention of some sort someday. If we do, I'll buy you a beer.
You know, I just shouldn't have chimed in. I'm beginning to regret that I did.
Thank you for speaking down to me. Now, lets get to business.
I get it. I actually understand computational complexity very well. Had you read the follow-up post, which was posted well before your post, you would see that I added the caveat "if P!=NP", long before you had a chance to talk down to me.
I actually threw in the caveat in a follow-up post (since I wasn't very atomic about it) that this was if P!=NP. Nothing that I said affects class inclusions once that caveat is thrown in.
Okay, but in the sense that any of the games in the original submission are NP-Hard, so are Chess and Go.
I've never seen one, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.
The generalizations of both games are NP-Hard. They're only constant time because of the fixed number of pieces and places for those pieces to go.
I should caveat all of this. The "no polynomial-time algorithm" bit is only true if P!=NP. If P=NP, then there is a deterministic polynomial-time algorithm for NP-Complete problems. NP-Hard, however, just means that it's at least as hard as NP, so, it's possible that there's no algorithm for that harder problem. You have to be really really precise when talking about this stuff.
PSPACE-Complete: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.52.41
Since I had to suffer through at least one professor who didn't understand basic complexity theory last night, and I know that Slashdot generally screws it up to.
NP-Hard means that there's no (deterministic) polynomial-time algorithm to solve the games. Additionally, you always have to generalize these games in order to make that claim. Since computational complexity is defined in terms of the length of the input, and certainly all of these games are being played on an input of fixed length.
However, there are effective approaches to solving NP-Hard problems. There are solvers for known NP-Hard problems. If you Google "sat solver" you'll find at least 5 that you can just download. SAT solvers are used in VLSI validation and other practical things. These solvers use heuristics to improve search performance, generally proposing answers and checking them (for NP-Complete problems).
Also, there are tons of games known to be NP or PSPACE complete. The reductions for those games are kind of a standard problem, since the AI community writes a bunch of these solvers.
I was about to say something similar, albeit, perhaps less derisively. I haven't tried Cyber Clean, but it seems like a great product. If it's at ThinkGeek, I'll have to throw it in with my next order of energy drinks.
This rig isn't stereoscopic and therefore isn't a pair of "virtual reality goggles" in the classic sense.
You mean that foreign intelligence agencies might suddenly become suspicious that something secret is going on when a group of black SUVs show up at a construction site?
No way! That's why the SUVs are BLACK! Duh!
I think that work experience is quite important, but a masters degree is generally a 1 year or 6 month add-on, depending on the route that you go. Nobody reading your resume is going to care about 1 year of work experience.
Also, at many companies the IT and programming staff are two different groups entirely. I'm a PhD student, but I have friends from my masters program who started out with 6 figure salaries. Though this is not the norm, most of them did start out in the high 5 figure range.
I'm fairly sure that they're taking a very very small sample of the whiskey if 750ml sells for $20,000.
Did anybody else read this and think of 2010: The Year We Make Contact. Obviously the movie version, not the book.
"All these toilets are yours except the ones on Europa..."
(For those who haven't seen both, the movie and the book differ significantly. In the book, the Russians are our friends, and we're on a space mission together. In the movie, they're our enemies, but we're still on a space mission together.)
It must have been a terrifying experience to have left such an impression on you ;-)
My understanding is that they try to mitigate that risk by sending out a dummy motorcade in some situations.
It's also worth mentioning that they're worried about their ideas being stolen during the course of undergraduate computer science education.
The situation comes up in research situations... but doesn't really happen when you're banging out your homework.
But, to the original poster. I'm sure you'll do great things down the road... but this really applies more to research and perhaps things like senior projects than your situation.
Indeed. I was just thinking that I'd really like to see a separate speed record for the fastest car that moves by spinning it's wheels.
"Also, I notice - they're the last to switch their lights on when it starts to get dark - or when there's fog/spray on the motorways."
Most of the more expensive automobiles turn their lights on and off automatically. As an anecdote, I noticed in myself that this put me into the habit of waiting for the car to adjust the lighting itself.
I saw a lot of comments on this and thought that I'd chime in.
Here's the idea.
If you have a fisheye lens, that lens normally projects onto a flat CCD which is used to take the picture. That picture is distorted when it hits the lens. If you want to flatten the picture, you can do so by modeling the distortion imposed on the image by the lens, then inverting that distortion. This is a common practice in computer vision applications.
If we're to look at this model, it becomes readily apparent that some sections of this undistorted image will have lower resolution than others because certain pixels will represent a much larger area on the surface of the lens. The mapping between the square CCD and the curved lens is not one-to-one.
If we're to use a curved CCD, we can raise the resolution of the image by distributing the receivers in the grid such that this mapping is closer to one-to-one (or perhaps exactly one-to-one).
Then, we just do the same undistortion process again in order to flatten out the image, this time taking into account the curvature of the CCD, however, if you read through the math, it becomes apparent that the model should be identical if the CCD lines up perfectly behind the lens, and only slightly different if it does not.
It's too bad that we didn't freeze him.
Oh well, we already know that they get his head back by the year 3000. It sits in the Hall of Presidents, in the head museum.