I understand it's possible all of mathematics could be a joke, but from what I have studied and know it would be highly unlikely for that to be true.
I think most people who have considered the issue (from the viewpoint of a scientist/mathematician/whatever) would disagree: The whole point is that mathematics is perhaps the one thing which cannot be a joke.
Mathematics is a way of discovering truths, requiring only logic (perhaps we should say "rational thought" here since logic has an overloaded meaning in math). You start with a set of assumptions, and you end with a set of theorems, truths, which follow inevitably from those assumptions.
Note that mathematics doesn't require "logic and some set of assumptions". Pure math tries to divorce itself from whatever set of assumptions you are working with.
Choosing your set of assumptions to correspond to the real world in some useful way is applied math.
Here, where you start making assumptions about the real world, is where you can start thinking that our existance might be a joke.
I'm sure some philosopher has said it better than I; the point is, it doesn't even make sense to talk about "reason" not working, because then we are trying to reason about "reasoning". You can't really present a good argument (presenting an argument is reasoning) saying that "reasoning" is invalid.
Oh now that's a critical mind at work! You accept the obviously flawed argument for ice on Mars because scientists know best? Someone brings up a valid point, that ice sublimates in a vacuum, and you counter with blind faith - in scientists. Yeah, don't think about it, they're smarter than you, they must be right.
O.K. exlain how thick sheets of ice can persist for eons in a vacuum.
Of course, you shouldn't trust a single source... Google for more, but this one corroborates with all the others I found, and is pretty clear.
Comets are small, fragile, irregularly shaped bodies composed mostly of a mixture of water ice, dust, and carbon- and silicon-based compounds.
Our entire solar system, including comets, formed from the collapse of a giant, diffuse cloud of gas and dust about 4.5 billion years ago.
So, why don't *you* explain why purported ice on the moon *won't* exist? I can think of some possible explanations for why it wouldn't exist (if that's found to be the case): Maybe lunar ice sheets would be thinner than mountain-sized (or whatever) blobs of ice in comets. Maybe the moon receives more energy than the comets (although not directly, given the "permanent shade" of the test sites).
But still, it's worth looking into, don't you think?
And in terms of "naivete", is it really all that unreasonable to assume that these scientists might know a little bit more about their field of study, than some random computer geek armed with what he remembers from his junior high "earth science" textbook?
I am not sure how "random" the digits of pi appear to be.
But one problem, is that you can't get past the most basic tenet of information theory: Say your "password" is 1 character (call it 1 byte). This gives you 256 possible streams of digits to use.
I don't know if the math wizards have proven that every possible sequence of digits appears in the expansion of pi, but it doesn't really matter. To come up with N "random" bits from an expansion of pi, you will have to have a password with N bits of input.
And, reusing one time pads is very bad. Two messages A and B which use the same one time pad are like (A+P) and (B+P), so you subtract the second from the first: (A+P)-(B+P), and now you just have A-B... and, the difference of two plaintext messages is relatively easy to recover (see my post one level up about this).
The problem is that language is not random. Neither is the SP4 binary. (Since SP4 is presumably compressed, it probably "looks" random to certain randomness tests, but it of course is not).
More important is to consider the english language case. If you encode one sentence of correct english language with another, it is rather likely that you can get both sentences back.
Just like a cryptogram (where you change all the letters around, ie 'E' becomes 'X') is relatively easy to solve.
It takes a little more work with two sentences mixed up this way.
Read some cryptography books, for examples of some remarkably "clever" schemes which have been broken, even by people without computers working at them.
It does not matter if you are in text mode or not. The text mode will allow 16 unique colors to be displayed. You still get to choose which 16 unique colors.
OK, *snaps fingers*, get me "Fight Club", or "A Clockwork Orange", or "Cake - Fashion Nugget".
It is much faster for me to lean over and grab a dvd or cd out of my cabinet, than it is for you to download a crappy rip which may or may not run on my particular os/hardware because of crummy codec issues.
Now, granted, you said "everything I archived", and I too could fit my home directory and useful other crap on a business card cd (or on my 20gb mp3 player / usb hd), but you're not really answering the dudes question.
But what if you have a lot of technical skills? MacDonalds won't hire you because they're concerned that you'll run off the first instance that a better job shows up!
Last year, I got a job stocking shelves at the Home Depot. When I applied, I was up front about the facts: I am a computer person, looking for a computer job. When I find one, you'll get two weeks notice. I am also a hard worker.
You just have to find the right places. And the job wasn't that bad, either... It was nice to do something physical.
Yeah, these sorts of things always make me wonder.
Any company or individual, either directly or indirectly, who knowlingly sends unsolicited email to any address associated with this domain, or that sends data which results in a uncontrolled web browser pop up...window
What if I send them an email, which contains a popup to my website? But, this website is "very secret", and my charge to access it is 1 BILLION DOLLARS (pinky to mouth) per page view.
I could even include in the email something like "by going here you agree to pay me all of your income forever"
Until both sides agree to a contract, there is no contract.
When I was in third and fourth grade, I read a lot of stories from "The Three Investigators" Series.
One of the stories (I don't remember which) was about a haunted house. The secret behind this haunted house, was a huge pipe organ which had been tuned to subsonic frequencies, to apply this very effect (making people afraid, etc).
The first of these books was named "The Secret of Terror Castle". Perhaps that is the one I remember. It was published in 1964.
I know it's cliche, but deep inside everybody is the same innocent child. Nobody truly want to hurt others, but their vision is distorted by pain and forgotten memories.
I used to feel pretty much this way too. But, I now think you are wrong. There are some people who really are evil. There are more who are assholes. There are lots of others who are just mean.
These are people who enjoy hurting others. They enjoy making others miserable.
I don't buy the "deep inside everyone is an innocent child" thing. Children can be the worst.
Empathy is something most people learn, not something they are born with. The ones who don't learn it are the evil/mean/assholes.
I think another interesting metric to look at would be cpu time used. If one of them took 90% CPU for 10 seconds, that would be a big winner imo.
reiser4 171.28s @ 30% CPU = 51.384s CPU reiserfs 302.53s @ 16% CPU = 48.4048s CPU ext3 319.71s @ 11% CPU = 35.1681s CPU xfs 429.79s @ 13% CPU = 55.8727s CPU jfs 470.88s @ 6% CPU = 28.2528s CPU
Re:The Matrix is just a movie
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There was an interesting article on genetic algorithms in popular science or popular mechanics a few years ago (circa 1998 or so I think).
Anyway, the specific application being developed was designing an FPGA circuit to detect whether or not a tone (of a specific frequency) was being played. Genetic algorithms were being used to "evolve" circuit designs on a computer, then upload them to the FPGA.
It ended up being the case that the final design used far less gates than any human could reasonably design. And, none of the human EE's could understand how it was done at first.
After analysis, it was shown that the evolved design was using subtle interplay between different parts, and that analog effects from gates next to each other were affecting the results, etc... - all things that an engineer would not consider. (In fact, not even a good thing to consider because it wouldn't work on other FPGAs, even of the same model number, because of the subtleties of the analog interaction).
But, the point is that the problem was solved by a computer program, in a much more efficient (and certainly, "creative" and "outside the box") way than humans would.
Also, note that the humans couldn't understand at first (and took quite some time to understand) a relatively uncomplex system (a few handfuls of logic gates)...
If we assemble systems with orders of magnitude more complexity (millions of gates), operating in similiar ways, there is no way a human will understand it. At this point, it will "come up with" solutions to problems, and there will be no way for a human to understand how it is coming up with these.
At that point, how could you argue that the systems (computer vs human mind) were different, or that one were better than the other, if they were each solving obscure problems, and we didn't understand either?
Reading your comment makes me wonder if you've ever taken an assembly class, let alone a regular programming one.
In fact I have never taken any programming courses. Nice argument technique though, I believe there's a name for it. I don't know the name, of course, since I'm so uneducated.
Companies who produce closed source products may be happy about it, but it is nothing more than happy coincidence.
Compilation increases performance (you don't have to recompile every time a program loads), and as a side effect, "obfuscates" source code. This is exactly what I said in my previous post, and you repeated it... what point were you trying to make?
I really doubt the "happy coincidence". Most companies don't care all that much about performance. If they have the choice of optimizing their app to increase performance 50%, or releasing it 2 quarters ahead of time, which will they choose?
Observe the python and java newsgroups/irc, and see how many people are asking how to make it so that their code can't be decompiled.
Regarding the encryption thing, I agree with you 100%, I have no idea why the grandparent put that word in there.
But, regarding steganography, if there is no reason to "hide" the source by distributing only binaries, then why doesn't everybody release their code? Why, when a company releases a software version, do people whine about its faults and ask the company to fix them, rather than fixing them themselves (or getting a programming friend to).
The purpose of compiling is to make a "more useful" form of the program for the computer to load. But, a side effect of compiling is definitely the "obfuscation" that occurs.
Since any decent decompiler can take that binary and get a working (or mostly working) set of source from it (just not the same as the original, and usually only in assembler)
So, how is a big blob of assembly code, possibly not working 100%, stripped of identifiers and comments, nearly as useful as "properly written" C/C++?
That means you have a required library that you can't ship under gpl, or ship it's source, or treat it as system-exception library (since MS doesn't ship it with the OS) - so you can't write a GPLed app using MS C-runtime (or MFC or VB runtime or.NET runtime or...).
Compressing with a lossy format does not always result in loss. Jpeg, mp3, aac, and other "lossy" formats have 2 parts: One is a lossless compression that works rather well for certain kinds of data. The other is a module which modifies your input source so that it fits into the kinds of data that the compressor can work well with. For Jpegs, that means making everything gradient blurs. For audio, that means getting rid of "useless" frequencies (outside of human hearing, or being overridden by another loud frequency played at the same time, etc)...
So, when you rip the second time, what has been burnt to the cd is already a signal which has been prepared for the aac compression phase.
If you compress with exactly the same settings, you should presumably get output which is identical in quality to the original (DRM'ed) aac.
You could always test by burning the new aac to cd and comparing.
How would this be any easier than doing keyframed animation with inverse kinematics?
I read something about this idea a few years ago. I'm pretty sure it was by the guy that did BMRT... a thesis paper of his or something.
Basically, the redid the animation of "Luxo" in pixar's animation short. "Luxo" is the bouncing desktop lamp. Making animated characters (even those that aren't human) move "nicely" is quite hard. It takes a lot of work.
For their project, the specified the constraint: That Luxo must move from point A to point B, and that's all. The only input the model had was "how much force to use on each joint at each particular time". So, they were animating its "muscles" with a genetic algorithm, and also running a physics simulation on the system. (They assigned mass to the individual components, etc).
It evolved several techniques of locomotion: The "standard" bouncing hop (which the "real" luxo does), dragging itself across the table, somersaulting, etc...
In short, they came up with good looking animation, without requiring much user input. And in the end, they had a genetic algorithm which could make Luxo walk any distance, without requiring the work of an animator.
This is important, because although its relatively easy to just loop an animation, it looks rather unnatural.
Python [python.org] dynamic typing. Templates for free.
If you think dynamic typing means templates for free, you are confused.
The whole point of templates are that you get general code (which works on lots of different types) and static typing at the same time. The functional programming community calls this "parametric polymorphism". The C++ community calls this "generic programming".
Using void* or discriminated unions in C to "hold anything" is a form of dynamic typing. Templates were added to C++ precisely because this approach sucked so much.
#ifdef NERD_METAPHORS I do both coding and technical support in the course of my work. If I am in the middle of writing a piece of code and the phone rings, I have to do a mental stack backtrace to get out of "Python mode" and into "speaking English to humans mode". This leaves the large amount of program state I was holding in my head in a shambles that I have to completely reconstruct before I can get back to coding.
However, if I receive an email, I will check it once I have reached some kind of pausing point in the code -- finish writing a function or module, or get the comments of what the current block is going to do sketched out. The user gets almost as fast of service (since I write small functions) and I get more code written. So email works much better in the course of my dual coding/support job than the phone does. #endif/* NERD_METAPHORS */
I have seen people saying this before, but I've never had a problem with it. You need to update your nerd mind to support non-local transfer of control. You save your stack, start a new one, and return to the previous one when you're ready to resume your task.
If you have a C-based nerd mind, then you can accomplish this with some setjmp/longjmp trickery.
If you have a C++-based nerd mind, you can use exceptions for many situations, and fall back to setjmp/longjmp for the others.
If you have a scheme-based nerd mind, (and some other functional languages), this facility is called "continuations"... see (call-with-current-continuation) (often abbreviated (call/cc))
Talk with your vendor about the specific requirements of your situation.
My first hard drive I bought used out of "The Want Advertiser", a weekly magazine of classified ads here in New England.
My computer at the time was a Tandy 1000SX, so it had 2 low density 5.25" floppy drives... I spent many afternoons playing the original MechWarrior on this machine.
<DIGRESSION> The Tandy 1000SX was an IBM PC compatible, but it had some custom hardware: It had sound which was better than the PC speaker (in that it was polyphonic), and some sort of 16-color graphics which was nevertheless incompatible with EGA... so, most games couldn't do better than CGA, but MechWarrior supported both Tandy Sound and Tandy Graphics! Because the processor was a lowly 8088 and MechWarrior was a true-3d engine (one of the first? filled polygons, but no texture mapping or anything), my mechs would take a step every 10 seconds or so... Battles would have taken forever, except for the fact that it was very easy to win in this game: Just take a Locust mech (the fastest), and use only machine guns (which generate very little heat)... It was very easy to run around behind enemy mechs, and then just shoot out a leg (which makes them fall over and die) </DIGRESSION>
Anyway, I bought a Seagate 40MB RLL hard drive out of the Want Advertiser for a measly $25. (HDs were far more expensive than this at the time). This was a godsend for me because I was only like 14, and my parents did not approve of my "computer habit." I had more money than other kids, although still not much... I babysat 4 days a week after school, 3pm til 9pm, for $10/day.
The guy said on the phone, "The drive works fine, except for one thing: Sometimes you have to turn the power off and on a few times to get it to work, it doesn't always spin up on the first try"... I got the drive, and it worked fine, I almost never had the problems the guy mentioned.
Another digression: The drive was RLL, but I only had an MFM controller (which I had also bought used, for $10). You could hook up an RLL drive to an MFM controller, but you could only address 17 out of the 32 sectors per track an RLL drive had, or something like that... So I only got like 20MB of usefulness, but after years of swapping 360k floppies, I was still happy.
Anyway, the drive got worse and worse over time, until finally I was afraid to turn the computer off because the drive would take sometimes 20 minutes of monkeying to get it to turn back on.
One day, I just couldn't get it to spin up for the life of me. I let it rest for awhile and tried again, and it still wouldn't work.
What I ended up doing always gets some people calling bullshit, but it's the truth: I took the case off of the drive, and I could see the platters and the arms and everything right there... I tried turning it on and I saw how it sort of jerked in one direction... So, I started it spinning in that direction by myself, and then turned it on, and it spun up fine, and I could use my drive. I replaced the cover and used the computer and everything was fine. The drive lived maybe 3 or 4 months after this, with me powering it down as infrequently as possible, but it was growing steadily worse in terms of bad sectors... I didn't have scandisk or anything, so every couple of weeks I would reformat the drive (the lowlevel format marked and avoided the bad sectors), and reinstall DOS and the software I used... (I had been used to having no HD anyway so this wasn't such a huge deal). When I finally gave up, more than 60% of the sectors were bad, and the top platter on the stack had fingerprints on it from where I had occasionally slipped while doing the manual spin up.
In Ringworld Engineers, you spend an great deal of time surrounding the concept of inter-species sex and copulation.
I find this frankly embarassing. I have always liked SF, but lots of the stuff Heinlein wrote, as well as Ringworld Engineers/Throne, I would feel embarassed recommending to non-SF people...
Regardless of the justifications (open enlightened societies result in elimination of sex taboos, yadda yadda), SF already has the stigma of being adolescent boy fantasies without its best authors pulling crap like this.
Slashdot Mirror
I understand it's possible all of mathematics could be a joke, but from what I have studied and know it would be highly unlikely for that to be true.
I think most people who have considered the issue (from the viewpoint of a scientist/mathematician/whatever) would disagree: The whole point is that mathematics is perhaps the one thing which cannot be a joke.
Mathematics is a way of discovering truths, requiring only logic (perhaps we should say "rational thought" here since logic has an overloaded meaning in math). You start with a set of assumptions, and you end with a set of theorems, truths, which follow inevitably from those assumptions.
Note that mathematics doesn't require "logic and some set of assumptions". Pure math tries to divorce itself from whatever set of assumptions you are working with.
Choosing your set of assumptions to correspond to the real world in some useful way is applied math.
Here, where you start making assumptions about the real world, is where you can start thinking that our existance might be a joke.
I'm sure some philosopher has said it better than I; the point is, it doesn't even make sense to talk about "reason" not working, because then we are trying to reason about "reasoning". You can't really present a good argument (presenting an argument is reasoning) saying that "reasoning" is invalid.
(bleh, I wish I could phrase that better)
O.K. exlain how thick sheets of ice can persist for eons in a vacuum.
Of course, you shouldn't trust a single source... Google for more, but this one corroborates with all the others I found, and is pretty clear.
So, why don't *you* explain why purported ice on the moon *won't* exist? I can think of some possible explanations for why it wouldn't exist (if that's found to be the case): Maybe lunar ice sheets would be thinner than mountain-sized (or whatever) blobs of ice in comets. Maybe the moon receives more energy than the comets (although not directly, given the "permanent shade" of the test sites).
But still, it's worth looking into, don't you think?
And in terms of "naivete", is it really all that unreasonable to assume that these scientists might know a little bit more about their field of study, than some random computer geek armed with what he remembers from his junior high "earth science" textbook?
I am not sure how "random" the digits of pi appear to be.
But one problem, is that you can't get past the most basic tenet of information theory: Say your "password" is 1 character (call it 1 byte). This gives you 256 possible streams of digits to use.
I don't know if the math wizards have proven that every possible sequence of digits appears in the expansion of pi, but it doesn't really matter. To come up with N "random" bits from an expansion of pi, you will have to have a password with N bits of input.
And, reusing one time pads is very bad. Two messages A and B which use the same one time pad are like (A+P) and (B+P), so you subtract the second from the first: (A+P)-(B+P), and now you just have A-B... and, the difference of two plaintext messages is relatively easy to recover (see my post one level up about this).
The problem is that language is not random. Neither is the SP4 binary. (Since SP4 is presumably compressed, it probably "looks" random to certain randomness tests, but it of course is not).
More important is to consider the english language case. If you encode one sentence of correct english language with another, it is rather likely that you can get both sentences back.
Just like a cryptogram (where you change all the letters around, ie 'E' becomes 'X') is relatively easy to solve.
It takes a little more work with two sentences mixed up this way.
Read some cryptography books, for examples of some remarkably "clever" schemes which have been broken, even by people without computers working at them.
It does not matter if you are in text mode or not. The text mode will allow 16 unique colors to be displayed. You still get to choose which 16 unique colors.
OK, *snaps fingers*, get me "Fight Club", or "A Clockwork Orange", or "Cake - Fashion Nugget".
It is much faster for me to lean over and grab a dvd or cd out of my cabinet, than it is for you to download a crappy rip which may or may not run on my particular os/hardware because of crummy codec issues.
Now, granted, you said "everything I archived", and I too could fit my home directory and useful other crap on a business card cd (or on my 20gb mp3 player / usb hd), but you're not really answering the dudes question.
But what if you have a lot of technical skills? MacDonalds won't hire you because they're concerned that you'll run off the first instance that a better job shows up!
Last year, I got a job stocking shelves at the Home Depot. When I applied, I was up front about the facts: I am a computer person, looking for a computer job. When I find one, you'll get two weeks notice. I am also a hard worker.
You just have to find the right places. And the job wasn't that bad, either... It was nice to do something physical.
What if I send them an email, which contains a popup to my website? But, this website is "very secret", and my charge to access it is 1 BILLION DOLLARS (pinky to mouth) per page view.
I could even include in the email something like "by going here you agree to pay me all of your income forever"
Until both sides agree to a contract, there is no contract.
When I was in third and fourth grade, I read a lot of stories from "The Three Investigators" Series.
One of the stories (I don't remember which) was about a haunted house. The secret behind this haunted house, was a huge pipe organ which had been tuned to subsonic frequencies, to apply this very effect (making people afraid, etc).
The first of these books was named "The Secret of Terror Castle". Perhaps that is the one I remember. It was published in 1964.
I know it's cliche, but deep inside everybody is the same innocent child. Nobody truly want to hurt others, but their vision is distorted by pain and forgotten memories.
I used to feel pretty much this way too. But, I now think you are wrong. There are some people who really are evil. There are more who are assholes. There are lots of others who are just mean.
These are people who enjoy hurting others. They enjoy making others miserable.
I don't buy the "deep inside everyone is an innocent child" thing. Children can be the worst.
Empathy is something most people learn, not something they are born with. The ones who don't learn it are the evil/mean/assholes.
I think another interesting metric to look at would be cpu time used. If one of them took 90% CPU for 10 seconds, that would be a big winner imo.
reiser4 171.28s @ 30% CPU = 51.384s CPU
reiserfs 302.53s @ 16% CPU = 48.4048s CPU
ext3 319.71s @ 11% CPU = 35.1681s CPU
xfs 429.79s @ 13% CPU = 55.8727s CPU
jfs 470.88s @ 6% CPU = 28.2528s CPU
There was an interesting article on genetic algorithms in popular science or popular mechanics a few years ago (circa 1998 or so I think).
Anyway, the specific application being developed was designing an FPGA circuit to detect whether or not a tone (of a specific frequency) was being played. Genetic algorithms were being used to "evolve" circuit designs on a computer, then upload them to the FPGA.
It ended up being the case that the final design used far less gates than any human could reasonably design. And, none of the human EE's could understand how it was done at first.
After analysis, it was shown that the evolved design was using subtle interplay between different parts, and that analog effects from gates next to each other were affecting the results, etc... - all things that an engineer would not consider. (In fact, not even a good thing to consider because it wouldn't work on other FPGAs, even of the same model number, because of the subtleties of the analog interaction).
But, the point is that the problem was solved by a computer program, in a much more efficient (and certainly, "creative" and "outside the box") way than humans would.
Also, note that the humans couldn't understand at first (and took quite some time to understand) a relatively uncomplex system (a few handfuls of logic gates)...
If we assemble systems with orders of magnitude more complexity (millions of gates), operating in similiar ways, there is no way a human will understand it. At this point, it will "come up with" solutions to problems, and there will be no way for a human to understand how it is coming up with these.
At that point, how could you argue that the systems (computer vs human mind) were different, or that one were better than the other, if they were each solving obscure problems, and we didn't understand either?
Reading your comment makes me wonder if you've ever taken an assembly class, let alone a regular programming one.
In fact I have never taken any programming courses. Nice argument technique though, I believe there's a name for it. I don't know the name, of course, since I'm so uneducated.
Companies who produce closed source products may be happy about it, but it is nothing more than happy coincidence.
Compilation increases performance (you don't have to recompile every time a program loads), and as a side effect, "obfuscates" source code. This is exactly what I said in my previous post, and you repeated it... what point were you trying to make?
I really doubt the "happy coincidence". Most companies don't care all that much about performance. If they have the choice of optimizing their app to increase performance 50%, or releasing it 2 quarters ahead of time, which will they choose?
Observe the python and java newsgroups/irc, and see how many people are asking how to make it so that their code can't be decompiled.
I can't decide whether this is a troll or not.
Regarding the encryption thing, I agree with you 100%, I have no idea why the grandparent put that word in there.
But, regarding steganography, if there is no reason to "hide" the source by distributing only binaries, then why doesn't everybody release their code? Why, when a company releases a software version, do people whine about its faults and ask the company to fix them, rather than fixing them themselves (or getting a programming friend to).
The purpose of compiling is to make a "more useful" form of the program for the computer to load. But, a side effect of compiling is definitely the "obfuscation" that occurs.
Since any decent decompiler can take that binary and get a working (or mostly working) set of source from it (just not the same as the original, and usually only in assembler)
So, how is a big blob of assembly code, possibly not working 100%, stripped of identifiers and comments, nearly as useful as "properly written" C/C++?
That means you have a required library that you can't ship under gpl, or ship it's source, or treat it as system-exception library (since MS doesn't ship it with the OS) - so you can't write a GPLed app using MS C-runtime (or MFC or VB runtime or .NET runtime or...).
P LToolsForNF
This usage is explicitly addressed in the GPL FAQ: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#CanIUseG
Compressing with a lossy format does not always result in loss. Jpeg, mp3, aac, and other "lossy" formats have 2 parts: One is a lossless compression that works rather well for certain kinds of data. The other is a module which modifies your input source so that it fits into the kinds of data that the compressor can work well with. For Jpegs, that means making everything gradient blurs. For audio, that means getting rid of "useless" frequencies (outside of human hearing, or being overridden by another loud frequency played at the same time, etc)...
So, when you rip the second time, what has been burnt to the cd is already a signal which has been prepared for the aac compression phase.
If you compress with exactly the same settings, you should presumably get output which is identical in quality to the original (DRM'ed) aac.
You could always test by burning the new aac to cd and comparing.
How would this be any easier than doing keyframed animation with inverse kinematics?
I read something about this idea a few years ago. I'm pretty sure it was by the guy that did BMRT... a thesis paper of his or something.
Basically, the redid the animation of "Luxo" in pixar's animation short. "Luxo" is the bouncing desktop lamp. Making animated characters (even those that aren't human) move "nicely" is quite hard. It takes a lot of work.
For their project, the specified the constraint: That Luxo must move from point A to point B, and that's all. The only input the model had was "how much force to use on each joint at each particular time". So, they were animating its "muscles" with a genetic algorithm, and also running a physics simulation on the system. (They assigned mass to the individual components, etc).
It evolved several techniques of locomotion: The "standard" bouncing hop (which the "real" luxo does), dragging itself across the table, somersaulting, etc...
In short, they came up with good looking animation, without requiring much user input. And in the end, they had a genetic algorithm which could make Luxo walk any distance, without requiring the work of an animator.
This is important, because although its relatively easy to just loop an animation, it looks rather unnatural.
wait... you're telling me you have to use OLE2/COM to talk to excel? the point of vba is that i's easy...
I'm keeping my eyes on the boarder for now.
Why, is he a member of the administration? That's the problem with renting rooms these days, you never know who to trust!
sorry, bad pun i know
While I understand that they are two different things, I do not understand what would put them on different legal ground.
Sampling should be considered "acceptable use", like quoting another work. Do it too much, and it's plagiarism, but a little bit is ok.
Also:
- Microsoft Works
- Advanced BASIC
- Christian Science
(Prepare for flamage)Python [python.org] dynamic typing. Templates for free.
If you think dynamic typing means templates for free, you are confused.
The whole point of templates are that you get general code (which works on lots of different types) and static typing at the same time. The functional programming community calls this "parametric polymorphism". The C++ community calls this "generic programming".
Using void* or discriminated unions in C to "hold anything" is a form of dynamic typing. Templates were added to C++ precisely because this approach sucked so much.
#ifdef NERD_METAPHORS
I do both coding and technical support in the course of my work. If I am in the middle of writing a piece of code and the phone rings, I have to do a mental stack backtrace to get out of "Python mode" and into "speaking English to humans mode". This leaves the large amount of program state I was holding in my head in a shambles that I have to completely reconstruct before I can get back to coding.
However, if I receive an email, I will check it once I have reached some kind of pausing point in the code -- finish writing a function or module, or get the comments of what the current block is going to do sketched out. The user gets almost as fast of service (since I write small functions) and I get more code written. So email works much better in the course of my dual coding/support job than the phone does.
#endif
I have seen people saying this before, but I've never had a problem with it. You need to update your nerd mind to support non-local transfer of control. You save your stack, start a new one, and return to the previous one when you're ready to resume your task.
If you have a C-based nerd mind, then you can accomplish this with some setjmp/longjmp trickery.
If you have a C++-based nerd mind, you can use exceptions for many situations, and fall back to setjmp/longjmp for the others.
If you have a scheme-based nerd mind, (and some other functional languages), this facility is called "continuations"... see (call-with-current-continuation) (often abbreviated (call/cc))
Talk with your vendor about the specific requirements of your situation.
My first hard drive I bought used out of "The Want Advertiser", a weekly magazine of classified ads here in New England.
My computer at the time was a Tandy 1000SX, so it had 2 low density 5.25" floppy drives... I spent many afternoons playing the original MechWarrior on this machine.
<DIGRESSION>
The Tandy 1000SX was an IBM PC compatible, but it had some custom hardware: It had sound which was better than the PC speaker (in that it was polyphonic), and some sort of 16-color graphics which was nevertheless incompatible with EGA... so, most games couldn't do better than CGA, but MechWarrior supported both Tandy Sound and Tandy Graphics! Because the processor was a lowly 8088 and MechWarrior was a true-3d engine (one of the first? filled polygons, but no texture mapping or anything), my mechs would take a step every 10 seconds or so... Battles would have taken forever, except for the fact that it was very easy to win in this game: Just take a Locust mech (the fastest), and use only machine guns (which generate very little heat)... It was very easy to run around behind enemy mechs, and then just shoot out a leg (which makes them fall over and die)
</DIGRESSION>
Anyway, I bought a Seagate 40MB RLL hard drive out of the Want Advertiser for a measly $25. (HDs were far more expensive than this at the time). This was a godsend for me because I was only like 14, and my parents did not approve of my "computer habit." I had more money than other kids, although still not much... I babysat 4 days a week after school, 3pm til 9pm, for $10/day.
The guy said on the phone, "The drive works fine, except for one thing: Sometimes you have to turn the power off and on a few times to get it to work, it doesn't always spin up on the first try"... I got the drive, and it worked fine, I almost never had the problems the guy mentioned.
Another digression: The drive was RLL, but I only had an MFM controller (which I had also bought used, for $10). You could hook up an RLL drive to an MFM controller, but you could only address 17 out of the 32 sectors per track an RLL drive had, or something like that... So I only got like 20MB of usefulness, but after years of swapping 360k floppies, I was still happy.
Anyway, the drive got worse and worse over time, until finally I was afraid to turn the computer off because the drive would take sometimes 20 minutes of monkeying to get it to turn back on.
One day, I just couldn't get it to spin up for the life of me. I let it rest for awhile and tried again, and it still wouldn't work.
What I ended up doing always gets some people calling bullshit, but it's the truth: I took the case off of the drive, and I could see the platters and the arms and everything right there... I tried turning it on and I saw how it sort of jerked in one direction... So, I started it spinning in that direction by myself, and then turned it on, and it spun up fine, and I could use my drive. I replaced the cover and used the computer and everything was fine. The drive lived maybe 3 or 4 months after this, with me powering it down as infrequently as possible, but it was growing steadily worse in terms of bad sectors... I didn't have scandisk or anything, so every couple of weeks I would reformat the drive (the lowlevel format marked and avoided the bad sectors), and reinstall DOS and the software I used... (I had been used to having no HD anyway so this wasn't such a huge deal). When I finally gave up, more than 60% of the sectors were bad, and the top platter on the stack had fingerprints on it from where I had occasionally slipped while doing the manual spin up.
That's my wacky hardware story.
In Ringworld Engineers, you spend an great deal of time surrounding the concept of inter-species sex and copulation.
I find this frankly embarassing. I have always liked SF, but lots of the stuff Heinlein wrote, as well as Ringworld Engineers/Throne, I would feel embarassed recommending to non-SF people...
Regardless of the justifications (open enlightened societies result in elimination of sex taboos, yadda yadda), SF already has the stigma of being adolescent boy fantasies without its best authors pulling crap like this.