computing was supposed to automate.... am i there to help the computer do it's job? or is the computer there to help me do mine?
You should note that the vast majority of computers (except the one at your desk) do work without intervention already. Your cell phone is a computer. Your CD player, DVD player, game console, and HDTV are all computers. There are many computers in your car. Every room door at a hotel has a computer. And so on... All of these computers have made "everyones lives easier by helping the person".
(The other argument is that desktop computers are still relatively new in the world. Like animals with big brains and a lot of potential, they need a lot of instruction, rearing, love, and attention. Eventually they will mature, require less attention, and maybe even take care of us.)
I think truly randomly generated maps are great. Doom (Doom 1) had a random map generator that would randomly create the map then randomly place power ups. No, the maps were not perfectly balanced, but then, that was the point: to find and exploit sensitive areas for that round, before moving on to the next randomly generated map. It was great fun for deathmatch.
Or more likely, the founders got screwed on terms from their investors (Accel, for instance) and a $2 billion sale translates to like $2 million for the founders. Just guessing.
Watching the videos, I'm concerned about the significant jitter in the display of the Wii pointer. Assuming the videos on Wii.com show the pointer at its best, I'm afraid of how good/bad the common case is going to be.
Yeah, I didn't realize Debian was so pedantic about the GPL. Regardless of any ego issues, it sounds like cdrtools was still free, just under a different but still open source license. Just one that sounds like it says "you're allowed to keep your changes private and commericial, if you like". The potential for closed corporate forking is grounds for kicking and forking to GPL?
Perhaps there needs to be some catchy name for this type of attack
How about "poison" instead of "virus", since its presence may cause illness or death but does not self replicate. As in "attackers injected poison RFID tags into system, which is now inoperable until repairs are made."
Am I the only person that thinks piping objects between processes instead of an raw byte stream sounds very, very awesome?
I do a lot of bash and perl scripting and am very good at it. The freedom in transformation that perl gives over plain text is huge.
Extending that data to objects opens up a whole new world of capability in the same way, say, perl and regular expressions opened up whole new capability for munging data. Mmmm... munging objects.
Absolutely, totally cool. Don't be a Microsoft hater just because it's the popular thing to do.
Can you imagine how much the salary of 20-30 people, over 10 years costs? Plus the cost of licensing technology, and office space!
Approximate $100k per person (avg salary + 30%), 25 people == $25 million. Add in, say, $5 million for everything else, total $30 million.
If they receive $30/copy, they would need to sell 1 million copies to cover the development cost. Something the grandparent was suggesting is feasible given the hype.
Rather than an argument for entropy, I find it easier to think of the set of all possible files all at once. Seriously.
A lossless compression algorithm must have a unique mapping (1:1) between input and output. Think of it as just a shuffling all possible output strings against all possible input strings.
There are always more, different input strings of length N than there are total strings from length 1 to length N-1. It is mathematically impossible to correspond all possible inputs of a certain length with output of strictly shorter length.
It's also easy to show (by induction) that if you guarantee the output string is never longer than the input string, then you also guarantee that the output string can also never be shorter than the input string. That is, to guarantee your compression factor is strictly >=1 actually guarantees compression factor is =1.
So designing a compression algorithm comes down to mapping the common inputs to shorter outputs, and displacing uncommon inputs with longer outputs. Necessarily.
1) choose what you want to compress, 2) choose what you don't want to compress, 3) design your algorithm accordingly.
"better" is a big word. Many, many metrics that can factor into "better", for instance: portable, maintainable. Java also has a huge standard library. (The depth of a language's standard library is a significant driving force in its popularity and adoption rate -- ref Java and Python.)
Mozilla/Firefox is written in C/C++ and regularly consumes 300MB of RAM over time on my machine with moderate usage.
I'm not saying Java is the best solution, but it is a good one. I am also glad computer science is still evolving.
(fwiw, I code in Java, C/C++, and many other languages.)
Why throw around unsupported remarks? Provide evidence. Bottom line: Java versus C++, for that set of benchmarks, Java is comparible in speed and code density, but median uses 12x more memory.
"The physicists were intrigued: Like viruses, money is transported by people from place to place. " The problem is that you give a bill to only one person. Most disease is not like that.
That you give a bill to only one person isn't significant. Tracking a large number of bills across a large number of people is sufficient. It might also help you to imagine "one bill" as the equivalent as "one germ", which you *do* give to only one person.
A real problem is that the set of pairs of people that exchange bills may not strongly correspond with the set of pairs of people that exchange germs. If there isn't a strong relationship between the two, deducing something about the spread of bills may imply little to nothing about the spread of germs.
Not trolling but challenging the basic presumptions...
A new computer requires the purchase of hardware and software to make that hardware work. The hardware is physical, and people intuitively understand that it costs money to buy it, even though its cost includes compensation for the original hardware development cost. Software is at least as difficult to develop as the hardware, if not significantly more difficult. Why should software be provided at no cost? Microsoft Windows is the result of millions of man-hours of development effort. MS Windows is a friendlier and easier experience for the average desktop user.
Provide support for the presumption that software should be a free (money) component in a new hw/sw computer purchase.
Newsflash: "consumers" are cattle. Make no mistake: the "consumers" will not only allow this, they'll let themselves be deluded into thinking they like it.... I, for one, am not a "consumer!" No, I am a customer, and more importantly, a citizen! I WILL NOT BE FUCKED WITH!
Really? Aside from pounding your fist, shouting, and cursing on Slashdot, what have you actually done about it? Angry cattle are still cattle.
GPS satellites are far away for geographic coverage. Your assertion should probably read:
Even with GPS, where light still travels at about a foot per nanosecond, you need nanosecond-accurate clocks to be able to make sense of the differences in timing.
I now get 3-5 spams a day in my Gmail Inbox. Thankfully the false positive rate (real mail marked as spam) is much much lower, though not zero. As a measure of volume, I currently have 1063 message in my Gmail spam folder. That suggests Gmail spam filter has decreased to around 90% effectiveness, at least for the sampling of mail+spam that I receive.
I get a 3-5 spam per day now in my Gmail Inbox, though thankfully the false positives (real mail marked as spam) are much, much lower though not zero. As a measure of my 30-day spam volume, my Gmail spam folder currently has 1063 messages. That suggests that Gmail spam filtering has reduced to 90% effectiveness, at least for the sample set of mail+spam that I receive.
Oh come on. You can't give Nintendo credit for making the controller wireless. That's an obvious extension that was just waiting for the enabling technology to become available.
Slashdot Mirror
You should note that the vast majority of computers (except the one at your desk) do work without intervention already. Your cell phone is a computer. Your CD player, DVD player, game console, and HDTV are all computers. There are many computers in your car. Every room door at a hotel has a computer. And so on... All of these computers have made "everyones lives easier by helping the person".
(The other argument is that desktop computers are still relatively new in the world. Like animals with big brains and a lot of potential, they need a lot of instruction, rearing, love, and attention. Eventually they will mature, require less attention, and maybe even take care of us.)
I think truly randomly generated maps are great. Doom (Doom 1) had a random map generator that would randomly create the map then randomly place power ups. No, the maps were not perfectly balanced, but then, that was the point: to find and exploit sensitive areas for that round, before moving on to the next randomly generated map. It was great fun for deathmatch.
Or more likely, the founders got screwed on terms from their investors (Accel, for instance) and a $2 billion sale translates to like $2 million for the founders. Just guessing.
Watching the videos, I'm concerned about the significant jitter in the display of the Wii pointer. Assuming the videos on Wii.com show the pointer at its best, I'm afraid of how good/bad the common case is going to be.
- Imagine if McDonalds had patented drive through food.
We'd all agree that's stupid, right? Why do people think business models on the internet is any different?Yeah, I didn't realize Debian was so pedantic about the GPL. Regardless of any ego issues, it sounds like cdrtools was still free, just under a different but still open source license. Just one that sounds like it says "you're allowed to keep your changes private and commericial, if you like". The potential for closed corporate forking is grounds for kicking and forking to GPL?
Perhaps there needs to be some catchy name for this type of attack
How about "poison" instead of "virus", since its presence may cause illness or death but does not self replicate. As in "attackers injected poison RFID tags into system, which is now inoperable until repairs are made."
Am I the only person that thinks piping objects between processes instead of an raw byte stream sounds very, very awesome?
I do a lot of bash and perl scripting and am very good at it. The freedom in transformation that perl gives over plain text is huge.
Extending that data to objects opens up a whole new world of capability in the same way, say, perl and regular expressions opened up whole new capability for munging data. Mmmm... munging objects.
Absolutely, totally cool. Don't be a Microsoft hater just because it's the popular thing to do.
Fyi, I have also used Jpype with success, which allows bidirectional operation between Java and CPython.
Approximate $100k per person (avg salary + 30%), 25 people == $25 million. Add in, say, $5 million for everything else, total $30 million.
If they receive $30/copy, they would need to sell 1 million copies to cover the development cost. Something the grandparent was suggesting is feasible given the hype.
Rather than an argument for entropy, I find it easier to think of the set of all possible files all at once. Seriously.
A lossless compression algorithm must have a unique mapping (1:1) between input and output. Think of it as just a shuffling all possible output strings against all possible input strings.
There are always more, different input strings of length N than there are total strings from length 1 to length N-1. It is mathematically impossible to correspond all possible inputs of a certain length with output of strictly shorter length.
It's also easy to show (by induction) that if you guarantee the output string is never longer than the input string, then you also guarantee that the output string can also never be shorter than the input string. That is, to guarantee your compression factor is strictly >=1 actually guarantees compression factor is =1.
So designing a compression algorithm comes down to mapping the common inputs to shorter outputs, and displacing uncommon inputs with longer outputs. Necessarily.
1) choose what you want to compress, 2) choose what you don't want to compress, 3) design your algorithm accordingly.
"better" is a big word. Many, many metrics that can factor into "better", for instance: portable, maintainable. Java also has a huge standard library. (The depth of a language's standard library is a significant driving force in its popularity and adoption rate -- ref Java and Python.)
Mozilla/Firefox is written in C/C++ and regularly consumes 300MB of RAM over time on my machine with moderate usage.
I'm not saying Java is the best solution, but it is a good one. I am also glad computer science is still evolving.
(fwiw, I code in Java, C/C++, and many other languages.)
Why throw around unsupported remarks? Provide evidence. Bottom line: Java versus C++, for that set of benchmarks, Java is comparible in speed and code density, but median uses 12x more memory.
That you give a bill to only one person isn't significant. Tracking a large number of bills across a large number of people is sufficient. It might also help you to imagine "one bill" as the equivalent as "one germ", which you *do* give to only one person.
A real problem is that the set of pairs of people that exchange bills may not strongly correspond with the set of pairs of people that exchange germs. If there isn't a strong relationship between the two, deducing something about the spread of bills may imply little to nothing about the spread of germs.
A new computer requires the purchase of hardware and software to make that hardware work. The hardware is physical, and people intuitively understand that it costs money to buy it, even though its cost includes compensation for the original hardware development cost. Software is at least as difficult to develop as the hardware, if not significantly more difficult. Why should software be provided at no cost? Microsoft Windows is the result of millions of man-hours of development effort. MS Windows is a friendlier and easier experience for the average desktop user.
Provide support for the presumption that software should be a free (money) component in a new hw/sw computer purchase.
Dude, good software is hard to write.
Really? Aside from pounding your fist, shouting, and cursing on Slashdot, what have you actually done about it? Angry cattle are still cattle.
When it was half done it was less than half the speed? Impressive. Was there a software/OS upgrade along the way, as well?
Even with GPS, where light still travels at about a foot per nanosecond, you need nanosecond-accurate clocks to be able to make sense of the differences in timing.
I now get 3-5 spams a day in my Gmail Inbox. Thankfully the false positive rate (real mail marked as spam) is much much lower, though not zero. As a measure of volume, I currently have 1063 message in my Gmail spam folder. That suggests Gmail spam filter has decreased to around 90% effectiveness, at least for the sampling of mail+spam that I receive.
I get a 3-5 spam per day now in my Gmail Inbox, though thankfully the false positives (real mail marked as spam) are much, much lower though not zero. As a measure of my 30-day spam volume, my Gmail spam folder currently has 1063 messages. That suggests that Gmail spam filtering has reduced to 90% effectiveness, at least for the sample set of mail+spam that I receive.
Oh come on. You can't give Nintendo credit for making the controller wireless. That's an obvious extension that was just waiting for the enabling technology to become available.
> Which, on a laptop, invariably happens at 9.8m/s^2.
Thumbnail sized modules costing a few bucks each: Chipcon CC2420.
I recently re-played though Star Control 2 -- which has been open sourced. It's definitely still a great game.