God save us from programmers pretending to be economists.
Bitcoin is not a proven store of value. The tech is less than three years old. All the other stores of value have ages in millennia.
Timucua scrip is backed by world reserve currency. Bitcoin isn't.
There are people who have dedicated their lives to studying economics. You haven't. You are spamming Wikipedia links as evidence for your attempts to increase the value of Bitcoin. You are trying to make money by spreading incomplete and incorrect information. That is Evil. Stop immediately.
Jebus in a sidecar, Slashdot; do you think we've all never heard of parallel programming before? OpenMP has been around for ten years now. Yeah, you can't write a for loop in C and expect magically parallelization. Seriously, is there ANYONE here who doesn't know this already?
If you're trying to dumb down your article content to the point where it annoys any vaguely experienced programmers... well, you're succeeding.
Since scalability is a concern for your app, you probably want to architect your server around a LAMP stack. For version control use git or svn. Windows licenses get more expensive as they accept more users, whereas LAMP stacks have only the cost of maintenance.
"Going to the cloud" vs "hosting your server" is only a question of which hardware will host your machine. It's irrelevant to you right now. If you're pinching pennies it's almost always cheaper and faster to run LAMP apps on local hardware and then scale to remote hosting when you have enough users to warrant.
The nature of your question indicates that you don't know all the questions yet. I think you need a few more months of R&D before you call yourself a web startup.
Slashdot, really: we ARE real engineers, unlike the Geek Squad type places; we KNOW how to fix computers; so posting yet another article on how lesser engineers are unreliable, immoral and unable to fix problems that we're able to fix... That is basically the ongoing and constant story of our professional lives. Please, editors, keep in mind your audience when you're choosing articles for slashdot. Thank you.
Actually, he's very much the classic style of crank. Instead of giving us a formal proof, his proof is a proof by example consisting of a great deal of code that has to be scrutinized by hand for conceptual errors. It works fine on his test cases of course; so therefore to him his "proof" is "correct."
> How does the solving of problems like these really help the world? I would like a sincere 'down-to-earth' answer that my 89 year old grandfather can understand and therefore be in position to donate to the effort of solving such problems.
Here's one for your grandfather then. When you bank online, you go onto a secure web site. The information you send to your bank is digitally encrypted. A bunch of mathematicians have demonstrated that the 3SAT problem is just as hard, or harder, as breaking the encryption that keeps your grandfather's bank info secure. So, if Romanov turned out to be right somehow, it wouldn't be safe for your granddad to bank using computers anymore, because Romanov would have indirectly created an algorithm that could be used to crack the encryption in a reasonable amount of time.
Other Slashdotters will come up with plenty of other examples why 3SAT is important.
With the major advent of apps, there exists several tracking apps that lets you manage all your apps that don't manage themselves. (hereinafter referred to as "app apps")
I have created an app that manages apps that manage other apps that do not manage themselves. (hereinafter referred to as my "app app app")
Kurt Godel is currently investigating whether my app app app manages itself. If not, this feature will be added by Q3.
Romanov's algorithm strongly resembles an algorithm from a debunked paper published around 2004.
Sergey Gubin wrote a series of similarly designed proofs around 2004. Instead of Romanov's notion of "concretization," Gubin used the term "depletion." Gubin's paper was debunked by some students at the University of Rochester.
Both reduction algorithms throw out key information about the original truth tables that cause the final solutions to be incorrect.
Constructive and exhaustive proofs that P != NP should never be trusted. I'm not a huge fan of formality in proofs, but sometimes you really need it.
That's OK because I have already patented the process of patent patenting. Therefore, any patent patenters who attempt to patent their patent patenting process will need to first license my patent patent patent.
Lucas is a smart, smart man. Right now, the Uncanny Valley makes these depictions and representations of actors cheap. Nobody wants to buy them. But it's a damn fine bet to assume that the tech for making them look much more real will improve vastly over the next ten or twenty years. It's a smarter business plan than a lot of valley startups I've seen. You can't have Brando in your movie right now, but someday soon you will. Buy the rights now while you can.
Okay, I get it. "Psychoacoustic Simulation" means he compressed it with MP3. See? It's not the same anymore.
One might call this the "lame" defense.
Or Ogg Vorbis, or any modern mdct-based audio codec. All of the newer ones have psychoacoustic models built in that reject frequencies that you probably can't hear, in favor of ones that you can.
"Psychoacoustic simulations are my synthetic creation of that series of sounds which best expresses the way I believe a particular melody should be heard as a live performance." Total audio engineering bullsht, but entertaining bullsht nonetheless.
IBM has a history of inadvertently making terrible PR for themselves with these man-vs-machine stunts. Everyone here should remember Kasparov vs. Deep Blue. Expect IBM to win Jeopardy, and expect there to be a hailstorm of "IBM cheats" controversy after the game.
The area of the board is very large (more than five times the size of a chess board). Throughout most of the game, the number of legal moves stays at around 150-250 per turn, and rarely goes below 50 (compare chess, where the average number of moves is 37). Because an exhaustive computer program for Go must calculate and compare every possible legal move in each ply (player turn), its ability to work out favorable lines of play is sharply reduced when there are a large number of possible moves.
The number of legal positions in chess is thought to be between 10^(43) and 10^(50). It has an estimated game-tree complexity of 10^(123). On a 19×19 board, there are about 3^361×0.012 = 2.1×10^170 possible positions, most of which are the end result of about (120!)^2 = 4.5×10^397 different (no-capture) games, for a total of about 9.3×10^567 games. Allowing captures gives as many as 10^(7.49×10^48) possible games, most of which last for over 1.6×10^49 moves.
Some quick notes on wubi, since this is Slashdot and it's probably the neatest part of the new release. Wubi has existed for a while but this is the first ubuntu that includes it as part of the distro.
Wubi permits you to install and dork around with ubuntu from within Windows. It has a comfy GUI front-end that creates a virtual partition within a Windows file, sets up the boot manager, downloads Ubuntu and installs it within the virtual partition. Ubuntu then boots and mounts the virtual partition within the Win32 file system. The installed Ubuntu can see the old Win32 file system and optionally read and write it. Windows sees the virtual partitions as a couple large files. And Wubi avoids making any partition changes to the target disk. All pretty cool actually, and significantly lowers the barriers to test-driving Ubuntu. See http://wubi-installer.org/ .
I disagree. Sound dropouts are caused by having insufficient buffer sizes, insufficient CPU time to do mixing and processing, or a combination of the two. While DirectSound supports on-board mixing and secondary buffers on sound cards, game programmers can't rely on their existence... and so very few modern games correctly support on-board mixing. What's more, Vista actively disables support for on-board sound mixing, so your fancy sound card definitely won't buy you anything on that platform.
The amount of memory and CPU required to process modern game sound is trivial (say 3 or 4 megabytes, plus maybe 1 or 2% of any modern CPU) compared to all the other stuff that a game must do. In practice, skippage is much more commonly related to buggy lying drivers than on- or off-board audio.
There's a huge quantity of hype surrounding PC audio cards, and there always will be. The vast majority of people can't tell the difference between on-board audio and an expensive sound card... especially when connected to the dreadful PC speakers that seem to be the standard nowadays, which are by far the weakest part in the typical signal chain.
3-D would be a great area to improve the PC in; unfortunately there's no gold standard for what 3-D sound should be. In fact there are a bunch of competing almost standards: PL2, EAX, DSound's HRTF, DTS, etc., etc.
So no, marketing buzz to the contrary, gaming is not necessarily enhanced by the use of a better sound card. And yes, I am a professional game audio programmer (IAAPGAP).
Slashdot is an awesome place to find out about the latest Internet Explorer vulnerabilities and the hippest Linux distros. But it's a truly dreadful, forsaken, necrotic place for getting legal advice and for finding the funny.
Funny is embedded in an underground cavern on the dark side of the moon from Slashdot. Funny is being cryogenically frozen in carbonite while Slashdot looks on and taunts funny with the voice of James Earl Jones. Funny is imprisoned in Florida, recounting hanging chad from the 2000 election, while Slashdot rules the country for eight years and mispronounces the word "nuclear". King of the Hill, My Name Is Earl, Wonder Showzen, Look Around You: all funny! Linux startup scripts, Microsoft patent trolling, packet sniffers going 1.0, DVORAK keyboards, anything written to be sung to the tune of anything else, parodies of Magic cards depicting tech moguls: all not funny!
There exists a damned fine reason why the Slashdot moderators are making millions writing PHP and perl scripts, and not making millions writing Hollywood sitcoms. 'CAUSE SLASHDOT IS NOT FUNNY!
Now I'm going to be moderated a troll by someone who writes parodies of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. Sigh.
Slashdot Mirror
God save us from programmers pretending to be economists.
Bitcoin is not a proven store of value. The tech is less than three years old. All the other stores of value have ages in millennia.
Timucua scrip is backed by world reserve currency. Bitcoin isn't.
There are people who have dedicated their lives to studying economics. You haven't. You are spamming Wikipedia links as evidence for your attempts to increase the value of Bitcoin. You are trying to make money by spreading incomplete and incorrect information. That is Evil. Stop immediately.
Jebus in a sidecar, Slashdot; do you think we've all never heard of parallel programming before? OpenMP has been around for ten years now. Yeah, you can't write a for loop in C and expect magically parallelization. Seriously, is there ANYONE here who doesn't know this already?
If you're trying to dumb down your article content to the point where it annoys any vaguely experienced programmers... well, you're succeeding.
Since scalability is a concern for your app, you probably want to architect your server around a LAMP stack. For version control use git or svn. Windows licenses get more expensive as they accept more users, whereas LAMP stacks have only the cost of maintenance.
"Going to the cloud" vs "hosting your server" is only a question of which hardware will host your machine. It's irrelevant to you right now. If you're pinching pennies it's almost always cheaper and faster to run LAMP apps on local hardware and then scale to remote hosting when you have enough users to warrant.
The nature of your question indicates that you don't know all the questions yet. I think you need a few more months of R&D before you call yourself a web startup.
Slashdot, really: we ARE real engineers, unlike the Geek Squad type places; we KNOW how to fix computers; so posting yet another article on how lesser engineers are unreliable, immoral and unable to fix problems that we're able to fix... That is basically the ongoing and constant story of our professional lives. Please, editors, keep in mind your audience when you're choosing articles for slashdot. Thank you.
Experts have determined that purchasing the most expensive chess set does not improve your ELO score. #noshitsherlock
Actually, he's very much the classic style of crank. Instead of giving us a formal proof, his proof is a proof by example consisting of a great deal of code that has to be scrutinized by hand for conceptual errors. It works fine on his test cases of course; so therefore to him his "proof" is "correct."
> How does the solving of problems like these really help the world? I would like a sincere 'down-to-earth' answer that my 89 year old grandfather can understand and therefore be in position to donate to the effort of solving such problems.
Here's one for your grandfather then. When you bank online, you go onto a secure web site. The information you send to your bank is digitally encrypted. A bunch of mathematicians have demonstrated that the 3SAT problem is just as hard, or harder, as breaking the encryption that keeps your grandfather's bank info secure. So, if Romanov turned out to be right somehow, it wouldn't be safe for your granddad to bank using computers anymore, because Romanov would have indirectly created an algorithm that could be used to crack the encryption in a reasonable amount of time.
Other Slashdotters will come up with plenty of other examples why 3SAT is important.
Don't get me started on abuse of the word "cloud". internet != cloud. server array != cloud.
With the major advent of apps, there exists several tracking apps that lets you manage all your apps that don't manage themselves. (hereinafter referred to as "app apps")
I have created an app that manages apps that manage other apps that do not manage themselves. (hereinafter referred to as my "app app app")
Kurt Godel is currently investigating whether my app app app manages itself. If not, this feature will be added by Q3.
Oh look, someone on Slashdot is flaming Internet Explorer and gets +5 for it. How novel and refreshing.
Romanov's algorithm strongly resembles an algorithm from a debunked paper published around 2004.
Sergey Gubin wrote a series of similarly designed proofs around 2004. Instead of Romanov's notion of "concretization," Gubin used the term "depletion." Gubin's paper was debunked by some students at the University of Rochester.
Both reduction algorithms throw out key information about the original truth tables that cause the final solutions to be incorrect.
Constructive and exhaustive proofs that P != NP should never be trusted. I'm not a huge fan of formality in proofs, but sometimes you really need it.
I am trying to parse the article now. There's very likely a fish in there somewhere.
Note that the Cornell library has hosted at least one other "proof" by a Russian researcher that 3SAT != NP (and that TSP != NP as well).
"Computer Science has nothing to do with computers" gets modded +4 Insightful? Slashdot has truly jumped the shark.
Truth, not flamebait.
That's OK because I have already patented the process of patent patenting. Therefore, any patent patenters who attempt to patent their patent patenting process will need to first license my patent patent patent.
Older, stabler, supports all those platforms, and it's cheaper.
Basically, it presents an Amazon S3 bucket as a network drive on your local PC.
http://www.jungledisk.com/
Lucas is a smart, smart man. Right now, the Uncanny Valley makes these depictions and representations of actors cheap. Nobody wants to buy them. But it's a damn fine bet to assume that the tech for making them look much more real will improve vastly over the next ten or twenty years. It's a smarter business plan than a lot of valley startups I've seen. You can't have Brando in your movie right now, but someday soon you will. Buy the rights now while you can.
Okay, I get it. "Psychoacoustic Simulation" means he compressed it with MP3. See? It's not the same anymore.
One might call this the "lame" defense.
Or Ogg Vorbis, or any modern mdct-based audio codec. All of the newer ones have psychoacoustic models built in that reject frequencies that you probably can't hear, in favor of ones that you can.
"Psychoacoustic simulations are my synthetic creation of that series of sounds which best expresses the way I believe a particular melody should be heard as a live performance." Total audio engineering bullsht, but entertaining bullsht nonetheless.
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/11/bluebeat-claims-to-own-new-copyrights-to-old-beatles-songs/
IBM has a history of inadvertently making terrible PR for themselves with these man-vs-machine stunts. Everyone here should remember Kasparov vs. Deep Blue. Expect IBM to win Jeopardy, and expect there to be a hailstorm of "IBM cheats" controversy after the game.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cK0YOGJ58a0
http://www.npr.org/programs/waitwait/
The area of the board is very large (more than five times the size of a chess board). Throughout most of the game, the number of legal moves stays at around 150-250 per turn, and rarely goes below 50 (compare chess, where the average number of moves is 37). Because an exhaustive computer program for Go must calculate and compare every possible legal move in each ply (player turn), its ability to work out favorable lines of play is sharply reduced when there are a large number of possible moves.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(board_game)#Nature_of_the_game
The number of legal positions in chess is thought to be between 10^(43) and 10^(50). It has an estimated game-tree complexity of 10^(123). On a 19×19 board, there are about 3^361×0.012 = 2.1×10^170 possible positions, most of which are the end result of about (120!)^2 = 4.5×10^397 different (no-capture) games, for a total of about 9.3×10^567 games. Allowing captures gives as many as 10^(7.49×10^48) possible games, most of which last for over 1.6×10^49 moves.
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/dvorsky20061208/
Some quick notes on wubi, since this is Slashdot and it's probably the neatest part of the new release. Wubi has existed for a while but this is the first ubuntu that includes it as part of the distro.
Wubi permits you to install and dork around with ubuntu from within Windows. It has a comfy GUI front-end that creates a virtual partition within a Windows file, sets up the boot manager, downloads Ubuntu and installs it within the virtual partition. Ubuntu then boots and mounts the virtual partition within the Win32 file system. The installed Ubuntu can see the old Win32 file system and optionally read and write it. Windows sees the virtual partitions as a couple large files. And Wubi avoids making any partition changes to the target disk. All pretty cool actually, and significantly lowers the barriers to test-driving Ubuntu. See http://wubi-installer.org/ .
I disagree. Sound dropouts are caused by having insufficient buffer sizes, insufficient CPU time to do mixing and processing, or a combination of the two. While DirectSound supports on-board mixing and secondary buffers on sound cards, game programmers can't rely on their existence... and so very few modern games correctly support on-board mixing. What's more, Vista actively disables support for on-board sound mixing, so your fancy sound card definitely won't buy you anything on that platform.
The amount of memory and CPU required to process modern game sound is trivial (say 3 or 4 megabytes, plus maybe 1 or 2% of any modern CPU) compared to all the other stuff that a game must do. In practice, skippage is much more commonly related to buggy lying drivers than on- or off-board audio.
There's a huge quantity of hype surrounding PC audio cards, and there always will be. The vast majority of people can't tell the difference between on-board audio and an expensive sound card... especially when connected to the dreadful PC speakers that seem to be the standard nowadays, which are by far the weakest part in the typical signal chain.
3-D would be a great area to improve the PC in; unfortunately there's no gold standard for what 3-D sound should be. In fact there are a bunch of competing almost standards: PL2, EAX, DSound's HRTF, DTS, etc., etc.
So no, marketing buzz to the contrary, gaming is not necessarily enhanced by the use of a better sound card. And yes, I am a professional game audio programmer (IAAPGAP).
Augh!
Slashdot is an awesome place to find out about the latest Internet Explorer vulnerabilities and the hippest Linux distros. But it's a truly dreadful, forsaken, necrotic place for getting legal advice and for finding the funny.
Funny is embedded in an underground cavern on the dark side of the moon from Slashdot. Funny is being cryogenically frozen in carbonite while Slashdot looks on and taunts funny with the voice of James Earl Jones. Funny is imprisoned in Florida, recounting hanging chad from the 2000 election, while Slashdot rules the country for eight years and mispronounces the word "nuclear".
King of the Hill, My Name Is Earl, Wonder Showzen, Look Around You: all funny! Linux startup scripts, Microsoft patent trolling, packet sniffers going 1.0, DVORAK keyboards, anything written to be sung to the tune of anything else, parodies of Magic cards depicting tech moguls: all not funny!
There exists a damned fine reason why the Slashdot moderators are making millions writing PHP and perl scripts, and not making millions writing Hollywood sitcoms. 'CAUSE SLASHDOT IS NOT FUNNY!
Now I'm going to be moderated a troll by someone who writes parodies of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. Sigh.
Fascinating to go back and read Eric Raymond's 2003 rant, which in retrospect seems quite prescient.
Is this irony? Japanese cell phones run at least two to three years ahead of the functionality in US cell phones.
Replace X with any form of mass media and the statement is still true. Discuss. Next up on Slashdot: hard drive failures and root canals are no fun.