C'mon, guys. An announcement of something is one thing, but this "article" is just a bunch of marketeering that would be more appropriate as an item under the "Advertisement" column.
To me, this read like a (rather well done) social satire article or humor column. In fact, I had to keep looking up at the URL to convince myself I hadn't been redirected to something at "The Onion".
Question the assumptions...
on
Making Change
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· Score: 1
I don't doubt that some other combination of 4 coin denominations would reduce the average number of coins of change. However, I seriously doubt that the underlying assumption is correct enough to support the conclusion:
"In finding coin denominations that minimize the average cost of making change, Shallit assumed that every amount of change between 0 and 99 cents is equally likely."
Due to things like the fact that lots of things are priced like somthing.99 or other.97 (and probably several other factors), the actual distribution of amount of change is probably far from uniform. This could significantly affect the conclusion.
In order to get a more realistic/useful result, one could get a good-sized random sample of actual change amounts given if one had access to a few days of cash register data from some large retailers, and then run the analysis on that. Assuming a uniform (or some other nice, clean distribution) may make the problem easier, but it doesn't necessarily lead to a conclusion that has anything to do with reality (i.e., GIGO).
Also, due to the short range of bluetooth, I'm guessing we'll need things like little tent cards to set on coffee shop tables next to some unsuspecting HD owner. Or maybe post-it (TM) notes. You could darchalk (darpen?) the post-it, palm it cunningly, and give the "HD provider" a friendly slap on the back ("Hey, nice system!").
Look into Eclipse!
on
Java IDEs?
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· Score: 5, Informative
IBM just announced (in the past day or so) the release to the open source community of Eclipse (http://www.eclipse.org/). Not only is it a great Java IDE, it's also designed for extensibility from the ground up.
Slashdot Mirror
> A few months back we discussed a similar removal of rat memories by a different method. ...I'd forgotten about that.
- G
C'mon, guys. An announcement of something is one thing, but this "article" is just a bunch of marketeering that would be more appropriate as an item under the "Advertisement" column.
To me, this read like a (rather well done) social satire article or humor column. In fact, I had to keep looking up at the URL to convince myself I hadn't been redirected to something at "The Onion".
In order to get a more realistic/useful result, one could get a good-sized random sample of actual change amounts given if one had access to a few days of cash register data from some large retailers, and then run the analysis on that.
Assuming a uniform (or some other nice, clean distribution) may make the problem easier, but it doesn't necessarily lead to a conclusion that has anything to do with reality (i.e., GIGO).
Also, due to the short range of bluetooth, I'm guessing we'll need things like little tent cards to set on coffee shop tables next to some unsuspecting HD owner. Or maybe post-it (TM) notes. You could darchalk (darpen?) the post-it, palm it cunningly, and give the "HD provider" a friendly slap on the back ("Hey, nice system!").
IBM just announced (in the past day or so) the release to the open source community of Eclipse (http://www.eclipse.org/). Not only is it a great Java IDE, it's also designed for extensibility from the ground up.
Yes, another vote for Lovecraft. His stories creep me out in places I didn't know existed.
I have no particular rah-rah comment, but I'll just say that his writing is some of the most tightly crafted that I have ever read.