So, I was going to mod you Troll, but I decided to respond instead, since I think a lot of people are under the same misapprehensions as you are.
Regarding the indentation-as-syntax, consider the following C code, where someone tried to add the baz() function to a loop: while (foo())
bar();
baz();
This code has an obvious bug. Baz() is not in the loop body, because the braces are missing. It's obvious from the indentation that that was the coder's intention. Why does one need an orthogonal and error-prone syntax for marking basic blocks, when the formatting already makes the intention obvious?
Here is the Insertion Sort algorithm exactly as presented in Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, and Stein's "Introduction to Algorithms": Insertion-Sort(A)
for j <- 2 to length[A]
do key <- A[j]
i <- j - 1
while i > 0 and A[i] > key
do A[i+1] <- A[i]
i <- i - 1
A[i + 1] <- key
Here is the same algorithm, implemented in Python: def InsertionSort(A):
for j in range(1, len(A)):
key = A[j]
i = j - 1
while (i >=0) and (A[i] > key):
A[i+1] = A[i]
i = i - 1
A[i+1] = key
I haven't left anything out. Paste that into a Python interpreter and run it: >>> x = [2,7,3,8,1] # create test case >>> InsertionSort(x) # call routine >>> x # look at result [1, 2, 3, 7, 8]
There are about a thousand other cool things, and of course there are inevitably some warts and poor design decisions too. Bottom-line for me, at least, it's the power of Perl, but at the extreme other end of the spectrum in terms of readability. The Google folks think so too.
A few years ago, I took Chris Okasaki's "Advanced Data Structures" course at Columbia. Looking at the Wikipedia Data Structures article others have mentioned, it's pretty good, but doesn't include, e.g. Pairing Heaps, which have excellent real-world performance. You might want to check out Chris's book Purely Functional Data Structures (ISBN 0521663504). Even though you're not working with a functional language, it's a good catalog of some recent data structures, and from what I saw in the class, he understands them at a very deep level.
We could continue to debate this endlessly, but maybe you could save time and just read the official report?
I'll also mention that 4 of the 5 NYC boroughs (Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx) have their electricity distribution almost entirely below ground. It was a massive investment, but it was long ago.
Dude, Terry Schiavo is not a terribly complex issue, and there was nothing "questionable" about her state. As was clearly documented at the time, her brain was gone. Tragic, but true. Those desperately trying to pretend that she had some higher-order function left were denying science, medicine, and facts. The craven politicians trying to get mileage out of the tragedy were disgusting, even by Washington D.C. standards, with actual-doctor Bill Frist the most egregious and hypocritical.
Re:The elephant in the room
on
Sims the New Dolls?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I'm the submitter. I actually have a vast collection of all different kinds of games, and recently had about a week of my life sucked away by Oblivion, which is an interesting hybrid of Sims-like life-simulation in a fully realized world, and standard FPS-like dungeon-crawler, and before that my biggest time suckers were the 4X games Civ4 and GalCiv2.
But, to address your question, I do have an awful lot of FPSs also. I would say that as with most genres, as you get deeper into them and play more of them, the differences and subtleties become obvious, and they (at least the good ones) don't feel that similar. Playing Unreal Tournament with friends on a LAN is totally different than playing DOOM III alone in a dark room which is totally different from the adventure story that is Half-Life 2. No One Lives Forever 2 feels utterly different from F.E.A.R., despite being from the same studio; the former is bright and hilarious, the other is a visceral and scary combination of a John Woo movie and The Ring.
I had a roommate who mostly played console fighting games. He had played them all, and could play them for hours on end. Each was completely different to him, some great, some lame, while to me they all looked like a pair of cartoon characters endlessly punching and kicking each other.
I guess when you play a particular genre a lot, your brain just factors out the common stuff (shooting the groups of enemies/punching your opponent) and focuses on the distinguishing characteristics.
At the social level, though, all the FPSs are either interactive movies (first person mode) or collections of short team or individual games with good replay value (multiplayer mode). Even the 4X games like Civ4 or GalCiv2 have actors that represent entire nations/planets. I never really had an urge to play a world sim where the actors represented individual people, but maybe that's because I never tried one, or maybe just because I'm a guy.
Most of the responses seem to be missing the point of the post.
OCR/handwriting recognition folks: what would the ideal handwriting for machine readability look like? Could simple variations on standard English cursive or printing approach 100% recognizability, or would the ideal have to be synthesized, like shorthand, and if so, what characteristics would such a script have?
The original paper can be found here. It actually dates from 2003. Despite my weak biology background, I found it very readable.
They also describe an interesting middle phase of the wasp attack which was not mentioned in the summary: after the brain injection, the roach furiously "grooms" itself for 30 minutes. They also note that the zombie behavior takes about 30 mins to take hold. Thus there's a possibility that the intense "itch" in the cockroach keeps it in the same place until its escape reflex has been fried.
In a weak defense of the poster, the "forth"-instead-of-"fourth" typo is in the original article. Even the Independent could use some better editors...
I belive this is the Google maps image they're talking about, based on this map and some of the photos. This part of the facility is surrounded by security fencing, and it appears a new reactor is under construction at the time of the photo.
http://daemonshield.sourceforge.net/ will temporarily block IPs that have more than a certain number of failed login attempts in a certain amount of time. It seems to block these attacks nicely.
Google Earth covers the entire earth, and has terrain height maps. Many cities outside the US and UK have hi-res satellite images. You can fly through the Grand Canyon, wander around Beijing's Forbidden City, stroll through Budapest, etc., all from the comfort of your desk. Highly addictive for the would-be globehopper.
In the time it took this guy to write the article, perhaps he could have added these data structures to C#/.NET's laughably impoverished System.Collections class. The big thing in the new, upcoming version 2.0 is that they're introducing, wait for it, linked lists.
Still no sign of anything resembling a set/multiset, or a tree structure, let alone something like a heap. The documentation is equally sad, making no mention of big-O complexity. The comparison with Java, both in content and documentation, is depressing.
I like C# as a language, but the CS illiteracy of the libraries is annoying and inconvenient. The lack of a concept of a tree means that there's no automatic way to show an XML DOM tree with a TreeControl. They both have independently-developed, incompatible, although largely equivalent, tree representations.
Also, note that the SortedList class does not implement the IList interface, and none of the shipped System.Collections classes implement their own CollectionBase.
Verisign has spent big $$$ to advertise its brand as the choice for heavyweight corporate customers. It boggles my mind that they're letting a high-visibility ISP twist in the wind. Talk about brand devaluation.
Any slashdot reader in coroporate IT should be writing a memo on this and sending it to the CIO/CTO and Legal teams. What will *your* company's registrar do if someone jacks your domain on a weekend? If you're paying the bucks for Verisign, the answer seems to be nada, or maybe they'll write you an infuriating not-out-problem e-mail.
I think the marketing/sales task for Verisign's competitors just got a notch easier too. Nothing like a good horror story...
Another difference between games and movies is that movies have a much broader cultural impact. $50/game makes the receipts look comparable, but five times as many people are seeing the movie, discussing it around the water cooler, etc.
And, of course, while the gamer demographic is older and more affluent than a decade ago, it's still mostly males under 35. The movie audience demographic is much broader.
Safesearch not perfect yet
on
Google Suggest
·
· Score: 1
Try "sucking". Those suggestions are not suitable for kids...
Did anyone else notice that Rosamund Pike appears to be filming Pride and Prejudice and Doom simultaneously? Now that's a true test for an actress. I hope she doesn't get confused between her two roles...
Slashdot Mirror
Regarding the indentation-as-syntax, consider the following C code, where someone tried to add the baz() function to a loop:
while (foo())
bar();
baz();
This code has an obvious bug. Baz() is not in the loop body, because the braces are missing. It's obvious from the indentation that that was the coder's intention. Why does one need an orthogonal and error-prone syntax for marking basic blocks, when the formatting already makes the intention obvious?
Or, consider this example from the paper Algorithm Education in Python:
Here is the Insertion Sort algorithm exactly as presented in Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, and Stein's "Introduction to Algorithms":
Insertion-Sort(A)
for j <- 2 to length[A]
do key <- A[j]
i <- j - 1
while i > 0 and A[i] > key
do A[i+1] <- A[i]
i <- i - 1
A[i + 1] <- key
Here is the same algorithm, implemented in Python:
def InsertionSort(A):
for j in range(1, len(A)):
key = A[j]
i = j - 1
while (i >=0) and (A[i] > key):
A[i+1] = A[i]
i = i - 1
A[i+1] = key
I haven't left anything out. Paste that into a Python interpreter and run it:
>>> x = [2,7,3,8,1] # create test case
>>> InsertionSort(x) # call routine
>>> x # look at result
[1, 2, 3, 7, 8]
There are about a thousand other cool things, and of course there are inevitably some warts and poor design decisions too. Bottom-line for me, at least, it's the power of Perl, but at the extreme other end of the spectrum in terms of readability. The Google folks think so too.
That would be 400 million light years. 400 light years wouldn't get you out of our local arm of the Milky Way.
A few years ago, I took Chris Okasaki's "Advanced Data Structures" course at Columbia. Looking at the Wikipedia Data Structures article others have mentioned, it's pretty good, but doesn't include, e.g. Pairing Heaps, which have excellent real-world performance. You might want to check out Chris's book Purely Functional Data Structures (ISBN 0521663504). Even though you're not working with a functional language, it's a good catalog of some recent data structures, and from what I saw in the class, he understands them at a very deep level.
Google has an undisclosed but presumably large number of data centers. Did traceroute tell you where your packets were actually going?
We could continue to debate this endlessly, but maybe you could save time and just read the official report?
I'll also mention that 4 of the 5 NYC boroughs (Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx) have their electricity distribution almost entirely below ground. It was a massive investment, but it was long ago.
Dude, Terry Schiavo is not a terribly complex issue, and there was nothing "questionable" about her state. As was clearly documented at the time, her brain was gone. Tragic, but true. Those desperately trying to pretend that she had some higher-order function left were denying science, medicine, and facts. The craven politicians trying to get mileage out of the tragedy were disgusting, even by Washington D.C. standards, with actual-doctor Bill Frist the most egregious and hypocritical.
But, to address your question, I do have an awful lot of FPSs also. I would say that as with most genres, as you get deeper into them and play more of them, the differences and subtleties become obvious, and they (at least the good ones) don't feel that similar. Playing Unreal Tournament with friends on a LAN is totally different than playing DOOM III alone in a dark room which is totally different from the adventure story that is Half-Life 2. No One Lives Forever 2 feels utterly different from F.E.A.R., despite being from the same studio; the former is bright and hilarious, the other is a visceral and scary combination of a John Woo movie and The Ring.
I had a roommate who mostly played console fighting games. He had played them all, and could play them for hours on end. Each was completely different to him, some great, some lame, while to me they all looked like a pair of cartoon characters endlessly punching and kicking each other.
I guess when you play a particular genre a lot, your brain just factors out the common stuff (shooting the groups of enemies/punching your opponent) and focuses on the distinguishing characteristics.
At the social level, though, all the FPSs are either interactive movies (first person mode) or collections of short team or individual games with good replay value (multiplayer mode). Even the 4X games like Civ4 or GalCiv2 have actors that represent entire nations/planets. I never really had an urge to play a world sim where the actors represented individual people, but maybe that's because I never tried one, or maybe just because I'm a guy.
Most of the responses seem to be missing the point of the post.
OCR/handwriting recognition folks: what would the ideal handwriting for machine readability look like? Could simple variations on standard English cursive or printing approach 100% recognizability, or would the ideal have to be synthesized, like shorthand, and if so, what characteristics would such a script have?
Dodgeball?
See their many, many comments on the MiniMSFT blog
Some particularly choice ones include this and this
The original paper can be found here. It actually dates from 2003. Despite my weak biology background, I found it very readable.
They also describe an interesting middle phase of the wasp attack which was not mentioned in the summary: after the brain injection, the roach furiously "grooms" itself for 30 minutes. They also note that the zombie behavior takes about 30 mins to take hold. Thus there's a possibility that the intense "itch" in the cockroach keeps it in the same place until its escape reflex has been fried.
In a weak defense of the poster, the "forth"-instead-of-"fourth" typo is in the original article. Even the Independent could use some better editors...
...to finally get MS Office on Linux.
Will this be the next step (after the recent reorg) of the long-awaited breakup of MS into more focused and independent companies?
I belive this is the Google maps image they're talking about, based on this map and some of the photos. This part of the facility is surrounded by security fencing, and it appears a new reactor is under construction at the time of the photo.
Any Australians who can confirm or correct?
What have they done to Columbia University's campus map?
Microsoft Version
(correct) Google Maps version
http://daemonshield.sourceforge.net/
will temporarily block IPs that have more than a certain number of failed login attempts in a certain amount of time. It seems to block these attacks nicely.
Google Earth covers the entire earth, and has terrain height maps. Many cities outside the US and UK have hi-res satellite images. You can fly through the Grand Canyon, wander around Beijing's Forbidden City, stroll through Budapest, etc., all from the comfort of your desk. Highly addictive for the would-be globehopper.
They have light sabers, death stars, and droid armies. But it seems they don't have ultrasound...
4. To suck up vast amounts of the space exploration budget, leaving nothing for robotic exploration that actually accomplishes real science?
The [H]ardOCP review made clear that dual core chips were weak for gaming. Any idea which sites he's fingering?
In the time it took this guy to write the article, perhaps he could have added these data structures to C#/.NET's laughably impoverished System.Collections class. The big thing in the new, upcoming version 2.0 is that they're introducing, wait for it, linked lists.
Still no sign of anything resembling a set/multiset, or a tree structure, let alone something like a heap. The documentation is equally sad, making no mention of big-O complexity. The comparison with Java, both in content and documentation, is depressing.
I like C# as a language, but the CS illiteracy of the libraries is annoying and inconvenient. The lack of a concept of a tree means that there's no automatic way to show an XML DOM tree with a TreeControl. They both have independently-developed, incompatible, although largely equivalent, tree representations.
Also, note that the SortedList class does not implement the IList interface, and none of the shipped System.Collections classes implement their own CollectionBase.
Verisign has spent big $$$ to advertise its brand as the choice for heavyweight corporate customers. It boggles my mind that they're letting a high-visibility ISP twist in the wind. Talk about brand devaluation.
Any slashdot reader in coroporate IT should be writing a memo on this and sending it to the CIO/CTO and Legal teams. What will *your* company's registrar do if someone jacks your domain on a weekend? If you're paying the bucks for Verisign, the answer seems to be nada, or maybe they'll write you an infuriating not-out-problem e-mail.
I think the marketing/sales task for Verisign's competitors just got a notch easier too. Nothing like a good horror story...
Another difference between games and movies is that movies have a much broader cultural impact. $50/game makes the receipts look comparable, but five times as many people are seeing the movie, discussing it around the water cooler, etc.
And, of course, while the gamer demographic is older and more affluent than a decade ago, it's still mostly males under 35. The movie audience demographic is much broader.
Try "sucking". Those suggestions are not suitable for kids...
Did anyone else notice that Rosamund Pike appears to be filming Pride and Prejudice and Doom simultaneously? Now that's a true test for an actress. I hope she doesn't get confused between her two roles...