You understand neither how the parent post is using the word "linear" nor the PageRank algorithm itself. You can rewrite the eigenproblem at the heart of PageRank as the solution to a linear system, but very few people do. Moreover, this is not the correct intuition to employ to understand what's going on: there are no "massive matrix inversions" here, just a simple iterative algorithm for extracting the dominant eigenvector of a matrix.
Furthermore, you've got it exactly backwards regarding the "connection" between PageRank and light transfer. Since the Markov process used to model a web surfer in the PageRank paper is operating on a discrete domain with an easily-calculable transition function, the stationary distribution (or ranking) can be determined exactly. In rendering, you have a continuous problem for which Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques provide one of the most efficient ways to approximate the solution...but you have to actually simulate a Markov chain to get it (see, for instance, Veach's seminal paper on Metropolis Light Transport). Computing PageRank is an "easy" problem, by comparison.
A dozen students a year is probably too small to have the depth and breadth you'd want to give you a truly "top-notch" CS education (although a focus on theory is far from a bad thing, seeing as how the undergraduate programs even at top-ranked institutions often skimp far too much in that department).
However, all other things being equal, I might vote for the liberal arts school anyways. Smart people are successful pretty much wherever they go, and the most important thing you'll learn in college is how to think. Memorizing Tomasulo's Algorithm or getting really good at handling templates in C++ are relative wastes of time compared to learning how to apply the scientific method and developing general strategies for thinking critically about complex problems. You could do a lot worse as an undergrad than to get a good exposure to the theoretical underpinnings of computer science, study physics and math really, really hard, and spend the rest of your time learning from people who don't spend all day sitting in front of an LCD screen.
The vast majority of the people I've met who have been truly influential in CS didn't get there by
mastering their undergraduate material: they made contributions by looking at problems in ways that wouldn't occur to people who only know what's in the textbooks. Additionally, very, very few of these people have been what I'd call hardcore hackers in a traditional, code-oriented sense.
In Tiger, you could copy a section of a PDF and paste it into (for example) a Keynote presentation or a new (cropped) PDF document. Leopard somehow totally screws this up: try to copy a section of a PDF and you get the entire page instead.
Incredibly disappointing that this update didn't fix this. At the very least, I wish Apple would acknowledge the problem: it's a huge, huge bug for those of us who write papers or make lots of presentations.
I've taught introductory computer graphics courses at both Stanford and the University of California, Santa-Cruz, and by far the most important change that needs to be made to the "traditional" curriculum is the introduction of the programmable pipeline. Far more so than the chosen language or API, teaching shaders forces students to understand the mathematics that lies at the heart of the graphics pipeline while simultaneously endowing them with the tools they need to create Really Cool Projects®. The prevailing mentality seems to be that asking students to handle lighting and transformations directly in an introductory setting is too difficult, but my experience has been that this is not at all the case.
For those that are interested, I have SIGCSE paper on the subject available here.
I can only assume that the original submitter was trolling, and yet by the replies I see in this thread apparently a lot of people are so completely out of touch as to validate his questions.
An online degree is absolutely, completely, totally, irrevocably, and utterly worthless to anyone who might wish to use your educational history to evaluate your competence. Online degree programs are (largely) diploma mills, and a certification from one of them doesn't carry any of the assurances about your relative skills and experience that a Bachelor's degree from a brick-and-mortar institution does.
As far as graduate school goes...well, if you even have to ask these questions you might as well give up on that right now. The "great" graduate schools are not even going to read your application if you don't come from a reasonably well-respected undergraduate institution. Of course, if your "degree" is from an online school, it doesn't really mater whether they read your application or not because you won't have the faintest idea what research is, and graduate school in computer science is training in research.
Bright, self-motivated people tend to excel regardless of where they are, so if you're one of those people you might be able to learn stuff in an online program. Since you already have a job as a programmer, it's entirely possible that, as a result of an online degree, you'd become a better programmer: when your boss puts problems in front of you, your online degree experience might make you more adept at solving them. What your online degree will not have taught you is how to find the really interesting problems yourself. People can stick all the "I didn't need college!" crap that I see whenever this topic comes up: a college education doesn't teach you what to think, it teaches you how.
Good reasoning! I like asking this question of people who haven't had any set theory, but even people who have tend not to see the second answer right away.
There's a giant vat with a nozzle attached hanging over a basket. Next to the basket, there's a monkey. Inside the vat is an infinite number of balls (okay, it's a big vat), each labeled with a single natural number (1, 2, 3,...). It's currently 11:00 AM (or, t = 1 hour to noon).
At t = 1 / k hour to noon (where k is a natural number) balls 2k and 2k - 1 fall out of the vat and into the basket. At the same instant, the monkey reaches into the basket, grabs ball k, and eats it. So, at 11:00, balls 1 and 2 fall into the basket, and the monkey eats ball 1. At 11:30, balls 3 and 4 fall into the basket, and the monkey reaches in and eats ball 2. This process continues ad infinitum.
The question, of course, is this: how many balls are in the basket at noon?
Now, if you've figured out that answer, here's a similar question that's both harder and easier. It's easier in that you're infinitely more likely to guess a correct answer, but harder since you're probably much less likely to be able to prove that it's correct.
Same problem, same vat, same monkey, same timing, same number of balls, except they're no longer labeled. So, at every t = 1 / k hour to noon, two balls drop into the basket, and the monkey reaches in and eats one ball. Now how many balls are there in the basket at noon?
I'll link to the solutions later, if nobody figures it out.;-)
*sigh* I wish people wouldn't post drivel like this (or mod it up, for that matter) when they clearly don't know what the hell they're talking about.
No, that's not what radiosity is. The effect you're referring to is called diffuse interreflection, and radiosity is a finite element method for simulating it based on heat transport. Of course, in the real world most surfaces aren't totally diffuse, and radiosity would have been a bad choice for simulating global illumination effects in Doom in particular since there's an awful lot of metal and other surfaces with strongly specular BRDFs.
More to the point, all global illumination algorithms are too slow to use in real-time game engines, and so level designers typically precompute these effects and store them in textures. This has nothing to do with the choice of engine: if your engine can display textures, it can approximate these precomputed effects. I don't know whether id decided to do this in Doom or not, but if they didn't it isn't because the engine is fundamentally limited in some way.
The article was ranking brands in terms of rate of growth. If you resort the columns by total brand value, Blackberry is a paltry 19th...far, far behind Google at No. 4.
The big problem with FP operations on GPU hardware right now is that nobody conforms to the IEEE standard. There's been some work at Stanford on determining exactly how much error propagates, but there's variation not only between the major card companies, but between individual cards and even between vertex and fragment FP units on a given same card!
Floating point operations aren't much use unless you have some idea how accurate they are.
...and based on that, I'm completely disinclined to listen to anything else he has to say. They marketed the talk around the idea that it would be based on his vision of what the world will be like when manufacturing processes catch up with simulation technology, but it was really just one big self-indulgent orgy of buzzwords and vapid counterculture. I'm a pretty intelligent guy, I love science fiction, and I'm perfectly willing to listen to smart people propound off-the-wall viewpoints, but I also have a pretty good bullshit detector, and Bruce literally didn't say anything the entire evening. I don't know how he got away with it: I guess you make up enough weird terms like "spime wrangling" and people just assume you must be cool.
The highlight of his address was when he claimed that Steve Jobs has cancer because the air isn't clean enough. After that, I basically stopped listening.
It really cracks me up that you rate finding large mersenne primes in the same category as curing disease or discovering other intelligent life forms. Talk about something with no practical applications...
Wow. You're completely missing the point of what freedom of speech means. Freedom of speech is about what the Government can do to limit your ability to express your ideas and opinions. Sure, someone might sue you for expressing them, but that's very different from being criminally prosecuted.
Furthermore, you're dead wrong if you think banning the statements you cited above is even remotely justifiable. You take one step down that road and it's all over. Freedom of speech means supporting the rights of others to express opinions that you find absolutely detestable: the only way I can be sure that I'll be allowed to express my opinions is if I'm sure that bigoted, racists, hateful assholes can express theirs.
In 1998, theoreticians proved that the problem was "NP hard" that no general solution exists that can be solved by a computer in finite length of time.
Wow. That's pretty far from what "NP hard" actually means.
This has gotten modded down, but he makes a good point. Nintendo is not growing with the gaming industry, and I don't think that bodes well for their future. Market share is the name of the console game, and Nintendo needs to rethink their business model if they want to have the resources to stay competitive. Nintendo's decision to aim the new Zelda game at young children cost them at least one Gamecube sale: mine. And I don't think I'm the only one.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't be afraid to say "I don't know."
Corollary: If you don't know, make sure you say "I don't know."
*sigh*
You understand neither how the parent post is using the word "linear" nor the PageRank algorithm itself. You can rewrite the eigenproblem at the heart of PageRank as the solution to a linear system, but very few people do. Moreover, this is not the correct intuition to employ to understand what's going on: there are no "massive matrix inversions" here, just a simple iterative algorithm for extracting the dominant eigenvector of a matrix.
Furthermore, you've got it exactly backwards regarding the "connection" between PageRank and light transfer. Since the Markov process used to model a web surfer in the PageRank paper is operating on a discrete domain with an easily-calculable transition function, the stationary distribution (or ranking) can be determined exactly. In rendering, you have a continuous problem for which Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques provide one of the most efficient ways to approximate the solution...but you have to actually simulate a Markov chain to get it (see, for instance, Veach's seminal paper on Metropolis Light Transport). Computing PageRank is an "easy" problem, by comparison.
A dozen students a year is probably too small to have the depth and breadth you'd want to give you a truly "top-notch" CS education (although a focus on theory is far from a bad thing, seeing as how the undergraduate programs even at top-ranked institutions often skimp far too much in that department).
However, all other things being equal, I might vote for the liberal arts school anyways. Smart people are successful pretty much wherever they go, and the most important thing you'll learn in college is how to think. Memorizing Tomasulo's Algorithm or getting really good at handling templates in C++ are relative wastes of time compared to learning how to apply the scientific method and developing general strategies for thinking critically about complex problems. You could do a lot worse as an undergrad than to get a good exposure to the theoretical underpinnings of computer science, study physics and math really, really hard, and spend the rest of your time learning from people who don't spend all day sitting in front of an LCD screen.
The vast majority of the people I've met who have been truly influential in CS didn't get there by mastering their undergraduate material: they made contributions by looking at problems in ways that wouldn't occur to people who only know what's in the textbooks. Additionally, very, very few of these people have been what I'd call hardcore hackers in a traditional, code-oriented sense.
Good luck!
In Tiger, you could copy a section of a PDF and paste it into (for example) a Keynote presentation or a new (cropped) PDF document. Leopard somehow totally screws this up: try to copy a section of a PDF and you get the entire page instead.
Incredibly disappointing that this update didn't fix this. At the very least, I wish Apple would acknowledge the problem: it's a huge, huge bug for those of us who write papers or make lots of presentations.
I've taught introductory computer graphics courses at both Stanford and the University of California, Santa-Cruz, and by far the most important change that needs to be made to the "traditional" curriculum is the introduction of the programmable pipeline. Far more so than the chosen language or API, teaching shaders forces students to understand the mathematics that lies at the heart of the graphics pipeline while simultaneously endowing them with the tools they need to create Really Cool Projects®. The prevailing mentality seems to be that asking students to handle lighting and transformations directly in an introductory setting is too difficult, but my experience has been that this is not at all the case.
For those that are interested, I have SIGCSE paper on the subject available here.
Because the prices weren't going to vary in a downwards direction.
Note to parents: don't listen to naming advice from someone who calls themselves "spidergoat2".
You should read Nancy Kress' Patent Infringement from the May 2002 edition of Asimov's. Science Fiction is all too often predictive of real life...
Well, some of them end up becoming pretty awesome people.
I can only assume that the original submitter was trolling, and yet by the replies I see in this thread apparently a lot of people are so completely out of touch as to validate his questions.
An online degree is absolutely, completely, totally, irrevocably, and utterly worthless to anyone who might wish to use your educational history to evaluate your competence. Online degree programs are (largely) diploma mills, and a certification from one of them doesn't carry any of the assurances about your relative skills and experience that a Bachelor's degree from a brick-and-mortar institution does.
As far as graduate school goes...well, if you even have to ask these questions you might as well give up on that right now. The "great" graduate schools are not even going to read your application if you don't come from a reasonably well-respected undergraduate institution. Of course, if your "degree" is from an online school, it doesn't really mater whether they read your application or not because you won't have the faintest idea what research is, and graduate school in computer science is training in research.
Bright, self-motivated people tend to excel regardless of where they are, so if you're one of those people you might be able to learn stuff in an online program. Since you already have a job as a programmer, it's entirely possible that, as a result of an online degree, you'd become a better programmer: when your boss puts problems in front of you, your online degree experience might make you more adept at solving them. What your online degree will not have taught you is how to find the really interesting problems yourself . People can stick all the "I didn't need college!" crap that I see whenever this topic comes up: a college education doesn't teach you what to think, it teaches you how.
I think, if you want to be precise, what Valve did in Lost Coast should be called Paul Debevec's High Dynamic Range.
Good reasoning! I like asking this question of people who haven't had any set theory, but even people who have tend not to see the second answer right away.
This is one of my favorites...
...). It's currently 11:00 AM (or, t = 1 hour to noon).
;-)
There's a giant vat with a nozzle attached hanging over a basket. Next to the basket, there's a monkey. Inside the vat is an infinite number of balls (okay, it's a big vat), each labeled with a single natural number (1, 2, 3,
At t = 1 / k hour to noon (where k is a natural number) balls 2k and 2k - 1 fall out of the vat and into the basket. At the same instant, the monkey reaches into the basket, grabs ball k, and eats it. So, at 11:00, balls 1 and 2 fall into the basket, and the monkey eats ball 1. At 11:30, balls 3 and 4 fall into the basket, and the monkey reaches in and eats ball 2. This process continues ad infinitum.
The question, of course, is this: how many balls are in the basket at noon?
Now, if you've figured out that answer, here's a similar question that's both harder and easier. It's easier in that you're infinitely more likely to guess a correct answer, but harder since you're probably much less likely to be able to prove that it's correct.
Same problem, same vat, same monkey, same timing, same number of balls, except they're no longer labeled. So, at every t = 1 / k hour to noon, two balls drop into the basket, and the monkey reaches in and eats one ball. Now how many balls are there in the basket at noon?
I'll link to the solutions later, if nobody figures it out.
Google isn't going to do anything of the sort, because Steve Ballmer is going to fucking kill them first!
*sigh* I wish people wouldn't post drivel like this (or mod it up, for that matter) when they clearly don't know what the hell they're talking about.
No, that's not what radiosity is. The effect you're referring to is called diffuse interreflection, and radiosity is a finite element method for simulating it based on heat transport. Of course, in the real world most surfaces aren't totally diffuse, and radiosity would have been a bad choice for simulating global illumination effects in Doom in particular since there's an awful lot of metal and other surfaces with strongly specular BRDFs.
More to the point, all global illumination algorithms are too slow to use in real-time game engines, and so level designers typically precompute these effects and store them in textures. This has nothing to do with the choice of engine: if your engine can display textures, it can approximate these precomputed effects. I don't know whether id decided to do this in Doom or not, but if they didn't it isn't because the engine is fundamentally limited in some way.
No, you're just a nitwit!
The article was ranking brands in terms of rate of growth. If you resort the columns by total brand value, Blackberry is a paltry 19th...far, far behind Google at No. 4.
The big problem with FP operations on GPU hardware right now is that nobody conforms to the IEEE standard. There's been some work at Stanford on determining exactly how much error propagates, but there's variation not only between the major card companies, but between individual cards and even between vertex and fragment FP units on a given same card!
Floating point operations aren't much use unless you have some idea how accurate they are.
The ultimate defense was to leave it with the doors unlocked, with all essentials locked into the trunk.
:-)
Yeah, that works great...until they steal the car itself.
...and based on that, I'm completely disinclined to listen to anything else he has to say. They marketed the talk around the idea that it would be based on his vision of what the world will be like when manufacturing processes catch up with simulation technology, but it was really just one big self-indulgent orgy of buzzwords and vapid counterculture. I'm a pretty intelligent guy, I love science fiction, and I'm perfectly willing to listen to smart people propound off-the-wall viewpoints, but I also have a pretty good bullshit detector, and Bruce literally didn't say anything the entire evening. I don't know how he got away with it: I guess you make up enough weird terms like "spime wrangling" and people just assume you must be cool.
The highlight of his address was when he claimed that Steve Jobs has cancer because the air isn't clean enough. After that, I basically stopped listening.
It really cracks me up that you rate finding large mersenne primes in the same category as curing disease or discovering other intelligent life forms. Talk about something with no practical applications...
Furthermore, you're dead wrong if you think banning the statements you cited above is even remotely justifiable. You take one step down that road and it's all over. Freedom of speech means supporting the rights of others to express opinions that you find absolutely detestable: the only way I can be sure that I'll be allowed to express my opinions is if I'm sure that bigoted, racists, hateful assholes can express theirs.
Wow. That's pretty far from what "NP hard" actually means.
This has gotten modded down, but he makes a good point. Nintendo is not growing with the gaming industry, and I don't think that bodes well for their future. Market share is the name of the console game, and Nintendo needs to rethink their business model if they want to have the resources to stay competitive. Nintendo's decision to aim the new Zelda game at young children cost them at least one Gamecube sale: mine. And I don't think I'm the only one.
Their previous strategy of releasing crappy music has been working pretty well so far, hasn't it?
Just wondering...is there anyone else out there whose console-buying decisions are based wholly on which system the next Final Fantasy comes out on?