Agree. I still remember I bought HL2 + CS Source a year ago for $29.99. I was anticipating a bundled release of both Ep.1 and Ep.2, so I didn't bother to buy Ep.1 from store or get it from Steam. But another year passed and still no sign of Ep.2. (What gives?)
I liked Valve's release model at the beginning since $19.99 per year for a renewable experience of HL2 is a reasonable deal to me. But now that Valve fails to deliver, I wonder if I should even bother with Ep.1 now.
Legislation is being discussed but not implemented yet. There are words that the new tax will come after February 2008.
Since Ontario already has 14% taxes on electronics (6% Federal + 8% Provincial), the add on recycle tax could increase the total taxes to about 17-20%. So considering an average video card costs around C$130-150, consumers are expected to pay about C$30 more off the listed price.
An alternative to tax increase? How about have people who want to dispose their working electronics to claim tax credit if they manage to sell the items off in used market? My experience is that if you sell each item below C$20, local people (seniors in particular) would buy it and in effect recycle them for you for free!
I agree with Stephen Hawkings that humanity should move to space as soon as possible. To ensure the survival of humanity as well as to change the way we think about the world and ourselves. What worries me though is, if space colonization is successful, it seems it is only a logical step for the new colonies to become self sufficient. When that happens, should they have their own sovereignty or should they continue to serve the Earth government? Do they pay taxes to the Earth government or do they collect their own taxes?
Yes, it is market segmentation and no, it is not artificial. Monopoly are price guessers because they don't know what the consumer demands are. In a non-monopoly market, businesses can gauge the demands and set prices accordingly by looking at how competitors behave. So naturally, monopoly suffers economical dead weight.
One common way for monopoly to reduce economical dead weight is to charge different prices for different market segments. e.g. Airlines sell economical and first class tickets. But for this to work, the monopoly must ensure that the products cannot be resold or transferred between the different segments. Product transfers have to go through the monopoly. Obviously, this market segmentation is failing in MS' case because the premise is not fulfilled (Vista activation crack).
It just show MS want to continue to behave like a monopoly.
The problem is that our existing parallel computational models and languages are derived from the sequential ones. This imposes extra complexity in the expression of parallel algorithms. e.g. Procedure, a very fundamental concept in the sequential world, turns out to be hazardous in the parallel world because it multiplexes code. When code is multiplexed, you have all the locking problems and the headache that comes with it. Using a pattern matching mechanism in place of procedural abstraction for expression of parallel algorithm has moderate success (e.g. see Tuple Space) in the past. However, once it is being used with a sequential language, the procedural barrier kicks in and multiplexing returns.
In summary, when we start to think parallel algorithms are scaled up version of the sequential ones, we already build a lot of artificial barriers in our way to think about parallel algorithms. It is probably not right neither, to think sequential algorithms are special cases of the parallel ones. The reason is that the overall complexity involved in sequential algorithms are much less than the complexity involved in the parallel ones (sequential algorithms have less things to get right than the parallel ones) and there is little reason to tweak the current sequential models at this point in time.
My modest proposal to the problem of parallel algorithms is to begin in the middle: initially we simply treat the two separate beasts (parallel and sequential) as individuals and find a minimal interface that would handling the complexity in both worlds reasonably well. Then expanding on this interface to cover as many ground in both direction simultaneously. Repeat and rinse until we find a good enough solution that could be implemented and optimized on existing hardware architecture (you want performance from parallel algorithms that compute correctly, right?).
My hypothesis is that we may never find a good enough interface that covers all of parallel and sequential worlds. However, the proposed process would let us adapt computational models as our needs have changed.
Never anticipate any dramatic changes in SC2. The reason is simple: Blizzard has little reasons to take the risk to ruin a well designed game SC1 together with its dedicated Korean players community+tournament. They would benefit more to incrementally improve on SC1 and grow the community rather than redesigning it. Besides, I think SC1's design is on the right track, so incrementally building on it wouldn't be such a bad idea.
I am still cautiously optimistic because the "wow" factor would be relatively low comparing to SC1 yet I am eager to see what changes Blizzard has/can make to the original SC1. Being one of Blizzard's most successful franchise and the 10th anniversary of SC, let's hope they deliver what SC2 deserves and not result in disgrace.
I don't disagree with the 90% idle / 10% usage pattern for office environment. The question I believe is whether or not the 10% usage is evenly distributed across business days. I really doubt they are evenly distributed because of the nature of business cycles and the way office administration normally allocates office spaces (locality often reflects similarity in business functions performed).
What this could mean is that, the remaining 10% usage time would be aggregated and creating possible burst loads when the resources are most needed. It looks to me this technology doesn't do much about handling burst loads.
My understanding is that the the users will still be sharing the underlying processors, I/Os and memory. But since they could run different OSes and there are no mentioning of how the individual schedulers would share usage information, could this lead to worse time sharing behaviour and a further degrade in user experience?
How about the good old CRTs? Used ones are dirt cheap in my local used markets. (For $10 you can get a 19".)
It's a pretty common tactics to throw your presenter off guards. Some people use this as a way to gauge the competency of the presenter. I know one university professor who is famous (or notorious, depends on your perspective) for using this tactics.
If there is a Starcraft 2, it is very likely to be Scenario B. The reason is that Korean gamers are the biggest supporters for Starcraft (they have pro tournament every year, which is a lot of money). If SC2 is too radically different from SC1, Blizzard runs into two primary risks: A) risk of losing the Korean gamers support (which is like Blizzard shotting themselves in the foot); B) the new gaming model they introduced may not be as successful or matured than the SC1 model. This could risk losing both SC1 and SC2 gamers base at the same time (which is like Blizzard shotting themselves in the foot together and then swallow suicide pills).
But then, Blizzard has to do something with SC series in order to keep the franchise alive. The SC-Ghosts didn't go as planned. So Blizzard now has to bite the bullet with SC2.
I agree with eldavojohn. Multi-core is *not* a must for application development. If your problem is better off with a multi-threaded solution, and time allows you to do it, I don't see why not. However, keep in mind that:
A) If your problem does not involve or has very little parallelism in it (e.g. scanning in compilers), I see little point to solve it in a parallel way;
B) Multi-threaded programs are harder to develop than sequential programs. Why? You have more things to get right. And if you don't understand the problems well enough, you often end up with a parallelized programs that are more complex than its sequential solution and with little (or none) performance gain.
Judging from the author comes from, I could understand why he wrote the article. And having spent some years in CS academic field myself, I don't disagree with the picture painted by the author.
But computer science academic research is not computer science! In academic research, you have to publish good results and write funding proposals (that actually get the $). And often, long term research (say 5+ years) that are worthwhile are neglected by grant committee because they like to see results sooner or they deem the research itself is too risky. So to some people (e.g. non-tenure track researchers), their prospect could be better without pursuing CS research at this time.
I start to suspect that what we observe now in CS academic is merely a consequence of the gradual disappearance of long term CS research over the last two decades. After all, without new ideas and concepts, CS academic research would exhaust the existing ones eventually. And when these ideas are being reused too frequently, the public stop caring and CS academic research loses funding support.
But then, if we look back to history, we can see great research can be done by people without funding. e.g. Einstein and Godel both completed their monumental works without people funding them. So I wouldn't be too pessimistic about the future of CS. CS Academic Research is another story though.
Recalling this previous article, I am quite impressed that Blizzard not only slash more accounts involving user agreement violation, but they are also straight to the point--these 1000 or so accounts are removed because they are involved with gil selling, which is illegal and will not be tolerated. The message is loud and clear.
I have some friends playing FFXI now. They told me on Phoenix server, the IGE employees are still doing business as usual. It seems Square only banned those gil sellers who are very, very aggressive.
Banning 800 out of 32 servers make you wonder how many gil sellers are actually out there. Keep in mind that Square never said explicitly that how many out of the 800 are linked to gil selling activities. Players who have repeating records for MPK or using grief tactics are banning candidates as well.
Anyone has experience with ASN.1 http://asn1.elibel.tm.fr/en/? JSON seems to be aiming in the same direction but I don't quite understand what is it they want to do differently.
We do not yet have a central body of knowledge for software engineering that people recognize.
I believe ACM attempted this problem before but withdrew the software engineer licensing proposal. IEEE probably has attempted too but I'm not sure what the status is right now.
An old book by David Gelernter and Suresh Jagannathan. I found this book is quite unique because Gelernter sees programs from a structural engineering perspective rather than mathematical view.
It seems to me that no one mentions Gould's contribution in his book Full House--or why variation should be taken as a measure of excellence rather than median, mode or average.
What I am saying is: how are you going to explain the concepts of crypto. to your normal joes. Normal joes probably tell you, "Why crypto? I don't really 'see' people 'stealing' my (e)mails or my communication. I don't need those protection."
(Don't laught; it came from the mouth of a business TA at the college that I am working in.)
It's a conceptual gap that we need to bridge, not something a simple definition can accomplish.
While crypto makes sense to majority of the/. readers, how are you going to explain crypto to your normal joes on the street (and those folks in power)?
Same idea applies to software. Why do the users of our software need a college degree to use it with ease?
Go take a look at some of the writings in
Donald Knuth's book Selected Papers on Computer Science to get a feel of what computer science is about. Knuth's target audience is the general public and it may very well fit your needs.
If you like designing algorithms, by all means, go to computer science.
Software engineers can never see themselves as
artists as long as they see themselves as servants of business.
Come to think of it: why should I spend the energy to design new software when I can can spend the same amount of energy in founding my own venture to earn greater profit?
When we look back at structural engineering (people who build towers and bridges), we often find a sense of beauty in their construction. Unfortunate, very few structural engineers today consider themselves as artists no more. Not to mention that this concept is not taught in majority of engineering school at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Agree. I still remember I bought HL2 + CS Source a year ago for $29.99. I was anticipating a bundled release of both Ep.1 and Ep.2, so I didn't bother to buy Ep.1 from store or get it from Steam. But another year passed and still no sign of Ep.2. (What gives?)
I liked Valve's release model at the beginning since $19.99 per year for a renewable experience of HL2 is a reasonable deal to me. But now that Valve fails to deliver, I wonder if I should even bother with Ep.1 now.
Legislation is being discussed but not implemented yet. There are words that the new tax will come after February 2008.
Since Ontario already has 14% taxes on electronics (6% Federal + 8% Provincial), the add on recycle tax could increase the total taxes to about 17-20%. So considering an average video card costs around C$130-150, consumers are expected to pay about C$30 more off the listed price.
An alternative to tax increase? How about have people who want to dispose their working electronics to claim tax credit if they manage to sell the items off in used market? My experience is that if you sell each item below C$20, local people (seniors in particular) would buy it and in effect recycle them for you for free!
I agree with Stephen Hawkings that humanity should move to space as soon as possible. To ensure the survival of humanity as well as to change the way we think about the world and ourselves. What worries me though is, if space colonization is successful, it seems it is only a logical step for the new colonies to become self sufficient. When that happens, should they have their own sovereignty or should they continue to serve the Earth government? Do they pay taxes to the Earth government or do they collect their own taxes?
Yes, it is market segmentation and no, it is not artificial. Monopoly are price guessers because they don't know what the consumer demands are. In a non-monopoly market, businesses can gauge the demands and set prices accordingly by looking at how competitors behave. So naturally, monopoly suffers economical dead weight.
One common way for monopoly to reduce economical dead weight is to charge different prices for different market segments. e.g. Airlines sell economical and first class tickets. But for this to work, the monopoly must ensure that the products cannot be resold or transferred between the different segments. Product transfers have to go through the monopoly. Obviously, this market segmentation is failing in MS' case because the premise is not fulfilled (Vista activation crack).
It just show MS want to continue to behave like a monopoly.
Hurray! We are one small step closer to the Protoss!
The problem is that our existing parallel computational models and languages are derived from the sequential ones. This imposes extra complexity in the expression of parallel algorithms. e.g. Procedure, a very fundamental concept in the sequential world, turns out to be hazardous in the parallel world because it multiplexes code. When code is multiplexed, you have all the locking problems and the headache that comes with it. Using a pattern matching mechanism in place of procedural abstraction for expression of parallel algorithm has moderate success (e.g. see Tuple Space) in the past. However, once it is being used with a sequential language, the procedural barrier kicks in and multiplexing returns.
In summary, when we start to think parallel algorithms are scaled up version of the sequential ones, we already build a lot of artificial barriers in our way to think about parallel algorithms. It is probably not right neither, to think sequential algorithms are special cases of the parallel ones. The reason is that the overall complexity involved in sequential algorithms are much less than the complexity involved in the parallel ones (sequential algorithms have less things to get right than the parallel ones) and there is little reason to tweak the current sequential models at this point in time.
My modest proposal to the problem of parallel algorithms is to begin in the middle: initially we simply treat the two separate beasts (parallel and sequential) as individuals and find a minimal interface that would handling the complexity in both worlds reasonably well. Then expanding on this interface to cover as many ground in both direction simultaneously. Repeat and rinse until we find a good enough solution that could be implemented and optimized on existing hardware architecture (you want performance from parallel algorithms that compute correctly, right?).
My hypothesis is that we may never find a good enough interface that covers all of parallel and sequential worlds. However, the proposed process would let us adapt computational models as our needs have changed.
Never anticipate any dramatic changes in SC2. The reason is simple: Blizzard has little reasons to take the risk to ruin a well designed game SC1 together with its dedicated Korean players community+tournament. They would benefit more to incrementally improve on SC1 and grow the community rather than redesigning it. Besides, I think SC1's design is on the right track, so incrementally building on it wouldn't be such a bad idea.
I am still cautiously optimistic because the "wow" factor would be relatively low comparing to SC1 yet I am eager to see what changes Blizzard has/can make to the original SC1. Being one of Blizzard's most successful franchise and the 10th anniversary of SC, let's hope they deliver what SC2 deserves and not result in disgrace.
I don't disagree with the 90% idle / 10% usage pattern for office environment. The question I believe is whether or not the 10% usage is evenly distributed across business days. I really doubt they are evenly distributed because of the nature of business cycles and the way office administration normally allocates office spaces (locality often reflects similarity in business functions performed).
What this could mean is that, the remaining 10% usage time would be aggregated and creating possible burst loads when the resources are most needed. It looks to me this technology doesn't do much about handling burst loads.
My understanding is that the the users will still be sharing the underlying processors, I/Os and memory. But since they could run different OSes and there are no mentioning of how the individual schedulers would share usage information, could this lead to worse time sharing behaviour and a further degrade in user experience?
How about the good old CRTs? Used ones are dirt cheap in my local used markets. (For $10 you can get a 19".)
It's a pretty common tactics to throw your presenter off guards. Some people use this as a way to gauge the competency of the presenter. I know one university professor who is famous (or notorious, depends on your perspective) for using this tactics.
If there is a Starcraft 2, it is very likely to be Scenario B. The reason is that Korean gamers are the biggest supporters for Starcraft (they have pro tournament every year, which is a lot of money). If SC2 is too radically different from SC1, Blizzard runs into two primary risks: A) risk of losing the Korean gamers support (which is like Blizzard shotting themselves in the foot); B) the new gaming model they introduced may not be as successful or matured than the SC1 model. This could risk losing both SC1 and SC2 gamers base at the same time (which is like Blizzard shotting themselves in the foot together and then swallow suicide pills).
But then, Blizzard has to do something with SC series in order to keep the franchise alive. The SC-Ghosts didn't go as planned. So Blizzard now has to bite the bullet with SC2.
I agree with eldavojohn. Multi-core is *not* a must for application development. If your problem is better off with a multi-threaded solution, and time allows you to do it, I don't see why not. However, keep in mind that:
A) If your problem does not involve or has very little parallelism in it (e.g. scanning in compilers), I see little point to solve it in a parallel way;
B) Multi-threaded programs are harder to develop than sequential programs. Why? You have more things to get right. And if you don't understand the problems well enough, you often end up with a parallelized programs that are more complex than its sequential solution and with little (or none) performance gain.
Judging from the author comes from, I could understand why he wrote the article. And having spent some years in CS academic field myself, I don't disagree with the picture painted by the author.
But computer science academic research is not computer science! In academic research, you have to publish good results and write funding proposals (that actually get the $). And often, long term research (say 5+ years) that are worthwhile are neglected by grant committee because they like to see results sooner or they deem the research itself is too risky. So to some people (e.g. non-tenure track researchers), their prospect could be better without pursuing CS research at this time.
I start to suspect that what we observe now in CS academic is merely a consequence of the gradual disappearance of long term CS research over the last two decades. After all, without new ideas and concepts, CS academic research would exhaust the existing ones eventually. And when these ideas are being reused too frequently, the public stop caring and CS academic research loses funding support.
But then, if we look back to history, we can see great research can be done by people without funding. e.g. Einstein and Godel both completed their monumental works without people funding them. So I wouldn't be too pessimistic about the future of CS. CS Academic Research is another story though.
As usual, Square's JP site is so much better.
http://www.square-enix.co.jp/dvd/ff7ac/
Recalling this previous article, I am quite impressed that Blizzard not only slash more accounts involving user agreement violation, but they are also straight to the point--these 1000 or so accounts are removed because they are involved with gil selling, which is illegal and will not be tolerated. The message is loud and clear.
Why can't Square-Enix do something like this?
I have some friends playing FFXI now. They told me on Phoenix server, the IGE employees are still doing business as usual. It seems Square only banned those gil sellers who are very, very aggressive.
Banning 800 out of 32 servers make you wonder how many gil sellers are actually out there. Keep in mind that Square never said explicitly that how many out of the 800 are linked to gil selling activities. Players who have repeating records for MPK or using grief tactics are banning candidates as well.
Kudo to Square-Enix PR department. Well done.
Anyone has experience with ASN.1 http://asn1.elibel.tm.fr/en/? JSON seems to be aiming in the same direction but I don't quite understand what is it they want to do differently.
Can anyone explain this please?
We do not yet have a central body of knowledge for software engineering that people recognize.
I believe ACM attempted this problem before but withdrew the software engineer licensing proposal. IEEE probably has attempted too but I'm not sure what the status is right now.
An old book by David Gelernter and Suresh Jagannathan. I found this book is quite unique because Gelernter sees programs from a structural engineering perspective rather than mathematical view.
It seems to me that no one mentions Gould's contribution in his book Full House--or why variation should be taken as a measure of excellence rather than median, mode or average.
I think it should be spoken.
What I am saying is: how are you going to explain the concepts of crypto. to your normal joes. Normal joes probably tell you, "Why crypto? I don't really 'see' people 'stealing' my (e)mails or my communication. I don't need those protection."
(Don't laught; it came from the mouth of a business TA at the college that I am working in.)
It's a conceptual gap that we need to bridge, not something a simple definition can accomplish.
Isn't that the root of the problem?
/. readers, how are you going to explain crypto to your normal joes on the street (and those folks in power)?
While crypto makes sense to majority of the
Same idea applies to software. Why do the users of our software need a college degree to use it with ease?
My 2 cents.
Sorry, I can't keep that off my mind.
Go take a look at some of the writings in Donald Knuth's book Selected Papers on Computer Science to get a feel of what computer science is about. Knuth's target audience is the general public and it may very well fit your needs.
If you like designing algorithms, by all means, go to computer science.
Software engineers can never see themselves as artists as long as they see themselves as servants of business.
Come to think of it: why should I spend the energy to design new software when I can can spend the same amount of energy in founding my own venture to earn greater profit?
When we look back at structural engineering (people who build towers and bridges), we often find a sense of beauty in their construction. Unfortunate, very few structural engineers today consider themselves as artists no more. Not to mention that this concept is not taught in majority of engineering school at all.
This is scared, if not, sad.