I was overjoyed and amazed that it was possible to create something that is completely incomprehensible by humans, yet does something useful. Fortunately, my programming style has changed a bit over the years:-)
Its very interesting how different cultures such a problem:
* Americans sue the school, lots of money is involved and afterwards a few individuals might be richer and most people have to suffer ridiculous consequences. * Here in Europe he will be properly treated in a quality hospital immediately, will be back in school the next day, and be able to play again in a week. * In Africa he might never be able to walk properly again because there's no money for a treatment. * Japanese would blame the kid for beeing stupid and dishonoring the school, and build a robot to replace him.
Google's spreadsheet has done quite a bit to expand its functionality lately. E.g. Offset, Percentile, Standardize are all there. You can even use web queries like
=GoogleFinance("MSFT"; "price")
which is pretty cool. You also can write your own "gadgets", which are kind of a replacement for Macros.
I hate to say it but performance in Linux sucks, especially for tab switching. In windows pressing Ctrl+Tab is almost instantly, in Linux (Ubuntu 7.10) it takes almost a second!
You are right that a specialized optimization usually produces better results than a PSO. But there are many cases where it is very time consuming to develop such an algorithm when it is good enough to just use the plain PSO. Compared to other metaheuristics, PSO does not not need lots of fitness evaluations, and it is very robust because it has few parameters. When it is good enough to use a simple off-the-shelf PSO, why develop a specialized optimizer?
the individuals don't necessarily need to work toward the good of the swarm. In fact they usually just act selfish, but the resulting emergent behavior is good for the whole swarm. For example, when huge locust swarms run out of food, they begin to eat each other. The effect is that each bird tries to fly away from its followers and eat the one flying before him, which results in the whole swarm moving to a new area where they can find more food.
Decent integration with -other- applications is non-existent.
In Gmail you can easily import mail from any POP3 account. There are a lot of tools available that check for new messages on gmail or any other webmail.
When I decide to just quit all windows of my web-browser to clean up my desktop I hate that the mail gets closed too.
How often do you really have to restart your browser? Also, you don't loose any data when closing & reopening your webmail so I don't see a problem here.
No offline functionality.
Compare this to "Always accessible, on any computer, anywhere". I much prefer being able to read & search all my mail wherever I am. Besides that, you can have both. Its easy to download your mail using POP3 too in case you really have to.
Large Attachments have to be 'downloaded' when I need them.
You don't need a mail client for that, just a harddisk where you can store downloaded attachments too. When you leave your attachment online too it does not really matter when your harddisk breaks.
PRIVACY. You can't rely on that with webmail.
You can't rely on any privacy when sending mails around in plain text. It also is a matter of who you can trust. I feel more save with gmail having my data than having it unencrypted on my local harddisk which might possibly get stolen by someone I don't want it to have.
User experience. Gmail is 'comparable' to a real application, in the same way that a mock-up looks like a real product. From 4 feet away it might even look the same, but start using it and its immediately obvious you are using a web based application.
Of course webmail has different properties than real applications, but I find that the added features like fast full text search, not having to delete any email, no worries with backups are killer features that no desktop application can provide.
That must mean that Sony is the biggest thief of all. How did they manage to create all the CD's that you can buy everywhere without copying/stealing? I don't belief each and every CD is hand-crafted by the artist.
I highly doubt that. Do you know where the asteroid came from? Who cares, it clearly was an act of terrorism! Iraq has terrorists, so the only conclusion can be that we have to invade Iraq.
Writing a fair scheduler is difficult. Why not let the user decide? I propose a popup message for each context switch: "Hello, it seems the CPU is doing a context switch. Which application to you want to allow to run this time?".
Last time I have heard something about the Neutrinos, there was an unresolved problem: Neutrinos do not have mass, therefore travel at the speed of light. But since they travel at the speed of light they have no sense of time, and therefore it should not be possible for them to change their state as they are practically frozen in time. This and earlier experiments confirm that despite that they change state. Are there already theories why this is possible?
I have rewritten unp, which is a simple extraction utility, just to see how a clean implementation would differ from it. The result is a much shorter, and easy to comprehend application called e.
The main difference between the two implementations is a clear separation of concerns. While unp looks like one large blob of code with no clear structure, e has all the rules in one place, and application logic in another place. In unp this lack of separation has already led to duplicated code.
In which way does this reinvent computing? From a users' perspective, the only change is that the computer is a bit faster. It certainly changes a bit of the operating systems code, special file systems etc, but thats not a revolution.
This does not help against my most favourite weapon, the water balloon. Unseen by metal detectors, blast radius 1m, approximate range 2-10m. Can surpass fences and walls through clever use of gravitational effects. Very effective as a drop weapon as it explodes on impact. Transforms kinetic energy into splash damage. Unfortunately, anybody that uses it will most likely be killed by a paranoid American.
In subsequent emails, he was begging me to come up with a solution (e.g. diamond sword, coated with steel, etc.?).
How about the good old deus ex machina, it worked for the ancient greeks. Just let one protagonist say something along this line: "thanks god they invented the nanofluxdiaconplexor, which transforms diamonds into the toughest material in the universe!"
you can be pretty sure that the number of games for the Wii will increase dramatically. The enormous success of the Wii was not expected, and the new controller was a quite risky idea. Because of this many game studios did not have big plans for the Wii, but with such good sales they have to change their strategy and develop cool Wii games. After all they want to make money, and lots of Wii consoles means lots of money.
Sorry, Linux is definitely ready for customers like grandpa. My parents are almost completely computer illiterate, and they are now happily surfing away with Linux. Installing and explaining Windows would have about the same effort to me, but now my maintenance effort is almost zero.
Linux is already good for very unexperienced users. The problem are users who were once introduced to windows, they are spoiled. It is about the same as when programmers are spoiled with the GOTO statement, it is possible to unlearn this mess but it takes a lot of effort.
Slashdot Mirror
Ever tried to reboot a system where *all* its data, including the operating system itself, is stored in RAM?
Its very interesting how different cultures such a problem:
* Americans sue the school, lots of money is involved and afterwards a few individuals might be richer and most people have to suffer ridiculous consequences.
* Here in Europe he will be properly treated in a quality hospital immediately, will be back in school the next day, and be able to play again in a week.
* In Africa he might never be able to walk properly again because there's no money for a treatment.
* Japanese would blame the kid for beeing stupid and dishonoring the school, and build a robot to replace him.
That's why I strongly believe jamming devices should be legal and everybody should have one.
what about a slashdot or digg like system. Everybody can submit, everybody can vote about the documents quality.
I hate to say it but performance in Linux sucks, especially for tab switching. In windows pressing Ctrl+Tab is almost instantly, in Linux (Ubuntu 7.10) it takes almost a second!
You are right that a specialized optimization usually produces better results than a PSO. But there are many cases where it is very time consuming to develop such an algorithm when it is good enough to just use the plain PSO. Compared to other metaheuristics, PSO does not not need lots of fitness evaluations, and it is very robust because it has few parameters. When it is good enough to use a simple off-the-shelf PSO, why develop a specialized optimizer?
the individuals don't necessarily need to work toward the good of the swarm. In fact they usually just act selfish, but the resulting emergent behavior is good for the whole swarm. For example, when huge locust swarms run out of food, they begin to eat each other. The effect is that each bird tries to fly away from its followers and eat the one flying before him, which results in the whole swarm moving to a new area where they can find more food.
That must mean that Sony is the biggest thief of all. How did they manage to create all the CD's that you can buy everywhere without copying/stealing? I don't belief each and every CD is hand-crafted by the artist.
I highly doubt that. Do you know where the asteroid came from? Who cares, it clearly was an act of terrorism! Iraq has terrorists, so the only conclusion can be that we have to invade Iraq.
Writing a fair scheduler is difficult. Why not let the user decide? I propose a popup message for each context switch: "Hello, it seems the CPU is doing a context switch. Which application to you want to allow to run this time?".
Last time I have heard something about the Neutrinos, there was an unresolved problem: Neutrinos do not have mass, therefore travel at the speed of light. But since they travel at the speed of light they have no sense of time, and therefore it should not be possible for them to change their state as they are practically frozen in time. This and earlier experiments confirm that despite that they change state. Are there already theories why this is possible?
Watch this timeless masterpiece of sexual education. We have to save the children!
o m-the-1960s/
http://www.ludzer.com/2007/07/22/anti-porn-psa-fr
I have rewritten unp, which is a simple extraction utility, just to see how a clean implementation would differ from it. The result is a much shorter, and easy to comprehend application called e.
The main difference between the two implementations is a clear separation of concerns. While unp looks like one large blob of code with no clear structure, e has all the rules in one place, and application logic in another place. In unp this lack of separation has already led to duplicated code.
In which way does this reinvent computing? From a users' perspective, the only change is that the computer is a bit faster. It certainly changes a bit of the operating systems code, special file systems etc, but thats not a revolution.
This does not help against my most favourite weapon, the water balloon. Unseen by metal detectors, blast radius 1m, approximate range 2-10m. Can surpass fences and walls through clever use of gravitational effects. Very effective as a drop weapon as it explodes on impact. Transforms kinetic energy into splash damage. Unfortunately, anybody that uses it will most likely be killed by a paranoid American.
Combined with the pair programming chair, this invention will mark a new era in extreme programming.
What about Richard Stallman? According to this trustworthy news source he was attacked first.
In subsequent emails, he was begging me to come up with a solution (e.g. diamond sword, coated with steel, etc.?).
How about the good old deus ex machina, it worked for the ancient greeks. Just let one protagonist say something along this line:
"thanks god they invented the nanofluxdiaconplexor, which transforms diamonds into the toughest material in the universe!"
problem solved.
I am posting this from the same computer on which currently Ubuntu is installing. Beat that, windows!
you can be pretty sure that the number of games for the Wii will increase dramatically. The enormous success of the Wii was not expected, and the new controller was a quite risky idea. Because of this many game studios did not have big plans for the Wii, but with such good sales they have to change their strategy and develop cool Wii games. After all they want to make money, and lots of Wii consoles means lots of money.
Sorry, Linux is definitely ready for customers like grandpa. My parents are almost completely computer illiterate, and they are now happily surfing away with Linux. Installing and explaining Windows would have about the same effort to me, but now my maintenance effort is almost zero.
Linux is already good for very unexperienced users. The problem are users who were once introduced to windows, they are spoiled. It is about the same as when programmers are spoiled with the GOTO statement, it is possible to unlearn this mess but it takes a lot of effort.