the chance that none of the 1e11 stars in Andromeda will collide with one of "our" stars is approximately 1 - (1e11 x 8.3e-19) = 1 - 8.3e-8, very close to 1
Don't you mean (1 - 8.3e-19) ^ 1e11? I mean, assuming each potential collision is an independant, random event. However, according to maple, this is still roughly 1. Huh. Imagine that.
By the way, if anyone around here actually read articles, someone might note that one of the researchers said that in the case where the sun ends up in the thick of things, the risk to the Earth is minimal, though the night sky would be quite bright due to all the starbursts going on.
But I think the coolest part is right before the collision, when an entire half of the night sky is filled with a great big spiral galaxy! Holy mind blow!
Man - "What? Stupid car, that's the wrong direction! It would take way longer that way."
45 minutes later, man explaining to boss why he's late:
Man - "Well, you see, my car kept giving me these bad directions, so I said 'enough is enough' and took over. But then I got into this big traffic jam! Stupid traffic. Stupid car."
COBOL must DIE! On that note, my classmates and I looked at the ridiculous amount of crap you had to put in the header of the program for it to run, and it sparked an idea: simply delete every line of COBOL code in the world, and burn every page on which there is a COBOL program printed, and no one will remember how to program COBOL! Mission accomplished:)
Step 1) Copy and paste your previous assignment to a new file...
Is anyone working on a Quantum Electrodynamic model of raytracing? Diffraction gratings would be cool. It would improve other things. Like hair, thin films, etc.
Yes, and it looks darn cool:
Stam99 Jos Stam, "Diffraction Shaders," Computer Graphics, Proc. of ACM SIGGRAPH 99, ACM Press, New York, 1999, pp. 101-110.
But haven't they also identified the quarries where the stones for the pyramids were cut? That would throw this theory out. Then again, maybe I'm on crack and they haven't found any such quarries.
if a simple explanation and a complicated explanation exist, then the simple one is almost always right
Yes. This is why Newtonian physics is still heralded as right, and all that quantum physics garbage is just mumbo jumbo. Clearly Newton's model is simpler, and it explained all of his observations, so it must be the right one by Occam's Razor.
Please. Science is the act of showing, over and over again, that Occam's Razor is wrong. I prefer to call it "Occam's Work Ethic".
I use misburned CDs as coasters. They look nice. I noticed that after getting drops of various alcoholic beverages on them, they developed transparent spots. This is an easy result to reproduce.
Re:Yes, I *can* brush this off.
on
MP3Pro Released
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· Score: 2
Fractal image compression, as implemented, sucks ass. First of all, the encoder is brute force so it takes forever to encode. This can easily be fixed by using a hash lookup based on steerable filter responses, but no one seems to have clued in to that! (??)
Now, even assuming someone gets a clue and makes the fast version, the quality still sucks in general. Have a look at Waterloo's BragZone, which compares these things:
http://links.uwaterloo.ca/bragzone.base.html
Of course, given the hash-based fast version, we can exploit more automorphisms than before because it's faster. So we might get better quality after all. However, the same hashed automorphisms can be used as predictors instead of as a dictionary, allowing us to encode one pixel at a time like LOCO-I, with the same theoretical compression ratio as the fractal method. Further, if we use a pyramid ordering for the pixels, we still get resolution independance. Finally, it is expected that using several weighted predictors will actually outperform the dictionary method.
So, long story short, we can make a kick-ass compressor using steerable filter responses (and several other invariants) to construct predictors, and using the predictors in the most state-of-the-art prediction-based framework. This compressor would kick nearly everything's ass.
Anyone want to code it? I have more details if you're interested:)
In the United States, it has been made officially acceptable to simply add "ed" to the end of a verb for the past tense. For instance, an increasing number of United Statesian publications are allowing words like "runned", "swimmed", "dived", "drived", and such. I am not kidding.
But the rest of the english-speaking world still insists on using the irregular forms, which we have come to know and love. I use these ones myself. For instance, when I derive an equation in calculus class, I say that I "derove" an equation yesterday, and that I have "deriven" many equations before.
why not simply have something on the jet that recieves the signals from the phone stations and transmits them on, that way they never have a chance to scatter, and the het should remain undetectable
Think about that for a moment... if you can send EM signals from any direction on their merry way as you suggest, then you have made a Klingon Cloaking device. Invisible to the naked eye, invisible to radar, and all that jazz. "simply" is not the adverb of choice here:)
But practically speaking, I think the main problem to tackle here is being able to receive the signals from all directions simultaneously and from every point on the surface, and also simultaneously re-transmitting the signals on the opposite side, again for all directions... that's a whole lot of electronics to cram into every square inch of the surface of the plane!
If the surface was truely changing color, then it would have to use the subtractive primary colors.
No, that's not why. The reason is to do with the mixing properties of the medium. RGB is appropriate when the emitted colors are added together (additive mixing), which happens in this case because the different colors of pixels do not overlap.
CMYK is appropriate when the colors are compounded (subtractive mixing) which happens in print because the inks are applied over top of each other, i.e. they do overlap.
My point was that saying a "bad" word by itself shouldn't be considered immoral. My example of what I wouldn't say is something that's meant to be hurtful towards someone else (the kid's teacher). I would teach my children that it's not very nice to purposefully say things to hurt other people. I think that's different than if the kid cuts his finger off in shop class and says "oh sh#t!"
The concept of swearing being "bad" is just so, so arbitrary that it pisses me off. It's as if someone, a long time ago, thought "Hey, people are feeling too good about themselves... I think we need more rules to place on people's lives... what haven't we restricted yet? Hmm... Oh, I've got an idea: let's pretend that some words that you can form with our alphabet are bad and tell people that it's immoral to utter them! Hehe. Yeah, that oughta get 'em going for a while! Quick! Spread the word! In the name of morality!"
Stupid, stupid control freaks, controlling for the sake of it.
But certainly I don't want my kids whipping it out in front of their teacher and saying "suck my fat one" or something... that seems a bit over the line, since I don't want myself to do it either. But my kids should be able to say anything that I can say.
Most people can't make out any detail smaller than a centimeter
Haha! Heehee. Sorry. Do you know what a centimeter is? My index fingernail is about a centimeter wide. On my monitor, the word DUCK is about a centimeter wide. I am 186 centimeters tall. The civilized world (read: not afraid to make changes to improve efficiency) uses the metric system now, so I suggest you learn it:)
Then again, I still tell everyone that I'm 6'1" and a bit..
If the only mechanism is appeal, and filing an appeal requires big money, how can there ever be justice?
Well, the obvious answer is that there can't. That's why there isn't. For me to use the courts effectively would cost me my entire livelihood and all my time. For someone at a large corporation it only costs a phone call.
Umm.... TiVo does just write the raw digital data to the disk, provided you're using a satellite system. It writes it in the original MPEG-2 format that comes right off the satellite.
I am sick of people patenting derivatives of hashing. Hashing is just so basic and obvious. Does that mean I can patent a method for storing a list of donut varieties in a hashed database? How about sorting? Can I sort something that's never been sorted, and then patent the process? Hashing is at least as basic as sorting.
Have you ever heard of "proof by contradiction"? It's generally easier to prove negatives in logic than to prove positives. Now I'm not saying the courts know about logic, but even they say "not guilty" when they find no proof of guilt. Hey, that's proving a negative. Haha.
Last I read, nuking certain asteroids is futile. Some of these things have recently been found to be a clump of smaller rocks held together by their collective gravity, instead of one big rock. Simulations found that nuking it would only spread the rocks around a bit, and most of them would still be heading straight for us, even reclumping again. This is bad, and it also makes using braking rockets on them difficult. We need a better solution.
Personally, I'm counting on the aliens to rescue us at the last minute:)
I agree! I type non-touch-type at about 60 wpm, which would probably improve if I learned touch-typing, but I code at about 15 cps, which I think would worsen if I switched to touch-typing. Touch-typing wasn't designed for coders.
My hands have these programmed-in "macros" for coding, where my fingers naturally prepare themselves for some fast-action keypresses, so I can type words like "while" in 0.05 seconds and stuff like that:) Couldn't have those "macros" if I touch-typed.
And no RSI here either (yet?) even though I've been coding since I wuz a youngin. I take frequent breaks, though.
The Rational Unified Process (of which Micro$oft is on the designing committee) recommends that 95% of a piece of software function before its release. Hmm... That explains a lot.
Personally, I find that beta-testing finds all the show-stopping bugs, and if you have any organizational skills at all in your coding, you can, with little difficulty, fix any bug that is reproducible. Then again, I've seen a whole lot of disorganized code out there.
Slashdot Mirror
the chance that none of the 1e11 stars in Andromeda will collide with one of "our" stars is approximately 1 - (1e11 x 8.3e-19) = 1 - 8.3e-8, very close to 1
Don't you mean (1 - 8.3e-19) ^ 1e11? I mean, assuming each potential collision is an independant, random event. However, according to maple, this is still roughly 1. Huh. Imagine that.
By the way, if anyone around here actually read articles, someone might note that one of the researchers said that in the case where the sun ends up in the thick of things, the risk to the Earth is minimal, though the night sky would be quite bright due to all the starbursts going on.
But I think the coolest part is right before the collision, when an entire half of the night sky is filled with a great big spiral galaxy! Holy mind blow!
You know, you just know this is going to happen:
Man driving to work.
Car - "take next left!"
Man - "What? Stupid car, that's the wrong direction! It would take way longer that way."
45 minutes later, man explaining to boss why he's late:
Man - "Well, you see, my car kept giving me these bad directions, so I said 'enough is enough' and took over. But then I got into this big traffic jam! Stupid traffic. Stupid car."
Hahaha
Yay! Windows works great as long as you don't install any apps! Thanks! Now I can watch my computer do absolutely nothing, 450,000,000 times a second!
We are pre-announcing the announcment of a product that does not exist.
Yes. That's how you get people to help out with an open source project. If you kept it quiet until it was done, it would never be done.
COBOL must DIE! On that note, my classmates and I looked at the ridiculous amount of crap you had to put in the header of the program for it to run, and it sparked an idea: simply delete every line of COBOL code in the world, and burn every page on which there is a COBOL program printed, and no one will remember how to program COBOL! Mission accomplished :)
Step 1) Copy and paste your previous assignment to a new file...
Is anyone working on a Quantum Electrodynamic model of raytracing? Diffraction gratings would be cool. It would improve other things. Like hair, thin films, etc.
Yes, and it looks darn cool:
Stam99 Jos Stam, "Diffraction Shaders," Computer Graphics, Proc. of ACM SIGGRAPH 99, ACM Press, New York, 1999, pp. 101-110.
slideshow version
But haven't they also identified the quarries where the stones for the pyramids were cut? That would throw this theory out. Then again, maybe I'm on crack and they haven't found any such quarries.
if a simple explanation and a complicated explanation exist, then the simple one is almost always right
Yes. This is why Newtonian physics is still heralded as right, and all that quantum physics garbage is just mumbo jumbo. Clearly Newton's model is simpler, and it explained all of his observations, so it must be the right one by Occam's Razor.
Please. Science is the act of showing, over and over again, that Occam's Razor is wrong. I prefer to call it "Occam's Work Ethic".
I use misburned CDs as coasters. They look nice. I noticed that after getting drops of various alcoholic beverages on them, they developed transparent spots. This is an easy result to reproduce.
Fractal image compression, as implemented, sucks ass. First of all, the encoder is brute force so it takes forever to encode. This can easily be fixed by using a hash lookup based on steerable filter responses, but no one seems to have clued in to that! (??)
Now, even assuming someone gets a clue and makes the fast version, the quality still sucks in general. Have a look at Waterloo's BragZone, which compares these things:
http://links.uwaterloo.ca/bragzone.base.html
Of course, given the hash-based fast version, we can exploit more automorphisms than before because it's faster. So we might get better quality after all. However, the same hashed automorphisms can be used as predictors instead of as a dictionary, allowing us to encode one pixel at a time like LOCO-I, with the same theoretical compression ratio as the fractal method. Further, if we use a pyramid ordering for the pixels, we still get resolution independance. Finally, it is expected that using several weighted predictors will actually outperform the dictionary method.
So, long story short, we can make a kick-ass compressor using steerable filter responses (and several other invariants) to construct predictors, and using the predictors in the most state-of-the-art prediction-based framework. This compressor would kick nearly everything's ass.
Anyone want to code it? I have more details if you're interested :)
RC5 press room, Circa 2004
contest organizer - The final results are in.
press - That's great! People are asking, how much of the keyspace was searched?
contest organizer - Actually, 100% was searched.
press - That's Amazing! What are the chances of exhausting the keyspace and finding the winner on the very last key? They must be mindbogglingly low!
contest organizer - Well, heh.. actually it's about 100%, because there was a tiny bug in the client. We'll have to start over.
In the United States, it has been made officially acceptable to simply add "ed" to the end of a verb for the past tense. For instance, an increasing number of United Statesian publications are allowing words like "runned", "swimmed", "dived", "drived", and such. I am not kidding.
But the rest of the english-speaking world still insists on using the irregular forms, which we have come to know and love. I use these ones myself. For instance, when I derive an equation in calculus class, I say that I "derove" an equation yesterday, and that I have "deriven" many equations before.
Okay, that last bit was a joke :)
why not simply have something on the jet that recieves the signals from the phone stations and transmits them on, that way they never have a chance to scatter, and the het should remain undetectable
Think about that for a moment... if you can send EM signals from any direction on their merry way as you suggest, then you have made a Klingon Cloaking device. Invisible to the naked eye, invisible to radar, and all that jazz. "simply" is not the adverb of choice here :)
But practically speaking, I think the main problem to tackle here is being able to receive the signals from all directions simultaneously and from every point on the surface, and also simultaneously re-transmitting the signals on the opposite side, again for all directions... that's a whole lot of electronics to cram into every square inch of the surface of the plane!
If the surface was truely changing color, then it would have to use the subtractive primary colors.
No, that's not why. The reason is to do with the mixing properties of the medium. RGB is appropriate when the emitted colors are added together (additive mixing), which happens in this case because the different colors of pixels do not overlap.
CMYK is appropriate when the colors are compounded (subtractive mixing) which happens in print because the inks are applied over top of each other, i.e. they do overlap.
My point was that saying a "bad" word by itself shouldn't be considered immoral. My example of what I wouldn't say is something that's meant to be hurtful towards someone else (the kid's teacher). I would teach my children that it's not very nice to purposefully say things to hurt other people. I think that's different than if the kid cuts his finger off in shop class and says "oh sh#t!"
The concept of swearing being "bad" is just so, so arbitrary that it pisses me off. It's as if someone, a long time ago, thought "Hey, people are feeling too good about themselves... I think we need more rules to place on people's lives... what haven't we restricted yet? Hmm... Oh, I've got an idea: let's pretend that some words that you can form with our alphabet are bad and tell people that it's immoral to utter them! Hehe. Yeah, that oughta get 'em going for a while! Quick! Spread the word! In the name of morality!"
Stupid, stupid control freaks, controlling for the sake of it.
But certainly I don't want my kids whipping it out in front of their teacher and saying "suck my fat one" or something... that seems a bit over the line, since I don't want myself to do it either. But my kids should be able to say anything that I can say.
Most people can't make out any detail smaller than a centimeter
Haha! Heehee. Sorry. Do you know what a centimeter is? My index fingernail is about a centimeter wide. On my monitor, the word DUCK is about a centimeter wide. I am 186 centimeters tall. The civilized world (read: not afraid to make changes to improve efficiency) uses the metric system now, so I suggest you learn it :)
Then again, I still tell everyone that I'm 6'1" and a bit..
If the only mechanism is appeal, and filing an appeal requires big money, how can there ever be justice?
Well, the obvious answer is that there can't. That's why there isn't. For me to use the courts effectively would cost me my entire livelihood and all my time. For someone at a large corporation it only costs a phone call.
"For me ta draw turdy-five cardz and not draw a single jellyplant, that tellz me sumtin"
Umm.... TiVo does just write the raw digital data to the disk, provided you're using a satellite system. It writes it in the original MPEG-2 format that comes right off the satellite.
I am sick of people patenting derivatives of hashing. Hashing is just so basic and obvious. Does that mean I can patent a method for storing a list of donut varieties in a hashed database? How about sorting? Can I sort something that's never been sorted, and then patent the process? Hashing is at least as basic as sorting.
Have you ever heard of "proof by contradiction"? It's generally easier to prove negatives in logic than to prove positives. Now I'm not saying the courts know about logic, but even they say "not guilty" when they find no proof of guilt. Hey, that's proving a negative. Haha.
Last I read, nuking certain asteroids is futile. Some of these things have recently been found to be a clump of smaller rocks held together by their collective gravity, instead of one big rock. Simulations found that nuking it would only spread the rocks around a bit, and most of them would still be heading straight for us, even reclumping again. This is bad, and it also makes using braking rockets on them difficult. We need a better solution.
Personally, I'm counting on the aliens to rescue us at the last minute :)
I agree! I type non-touch-type at about 60 wpm, which would probably improve if I learned touch-typing, but I code at about 15 cps, which I think would worsen if I switched to touch-typing. Touch-typing wasn't designed for coders.
:) Couldn't have those "macros" if I touch-typed.
My hands have these programmed-in "macros" for coding, where my fingers naturally prepare themselves for some fast-action keypresses, so I can type words like "while" in 0.05 seconds and stuff like that
And no RSI here either (yet?) even though I've been coding since I wuz a youngin. I take frequent breaks, though.
The Rational Unified Process (of which Micro$oft is on the designing committee) recommends that 95% of a piece of software function before its release. Hmm... That explains a lot.
Personally, I find that beta-testing finds all the show-stopping bugs, and if you have any organizational skills at all in your coding, you can, with little difficulty, fix any bug that is reproducible. Then again, I've seen a whole lot of disorganized code out there.