Before making the big leap into opengl and such, you can make a simpler step into fully programmatic computer animations, either with Processing or Happy Fun Coding.
<quote><p>Oh, and don't buy Apple... unless "cool" is worth a ~100% tax to you.</p></quote>
Or unless you want an operating system that is reliable, usable, pretty, is a System 7 Certified Unix, does everything you need linux for, still has the major office and productivity packages of Windows (no, Open Office and The Gimp are not adequate replacements), has reliable and well architected hardware, connects seamlessly to WIFI without me even having to think about it, is largely untargetted by viruses (at least through obscurity), automagically supports most every peripheral I've plugged into it, and generally Just Works. Spending $2k to upgrade my laptop every 3 years is worth every penny to me. And that's making 24k/year as a graduate student.
I use OS X on my laptop, Linux on my servers/clusters, and Windows when I have to (database, webserver, a few specialty aps).
Yes, it has drawbacks. It's not as configurable as some people would like (same could be said of linux and windows). It doesn't have ALL the major games (though still a good number if you're not picky). You have to buy right after refresh, as christian.ost says, to get the best value for hardware (and don't ever buy RAM from apple, holy cow overpriced). I don't particularly like Apple as a company (especially their mobile division), but it's not like I'm a big fan of Microsoft, HP, Toshiba, or anyone else either.
OK, feeling better now. Having a flamewar on/. once a year is good for the soul.
While recovering the maximal amount of biofuel from your algae population is certainly a problem, it's not the reason we're not using biofuels in mass. The reason for that is that when you have a giant tank of food (many football fields for comercial factories), eventually a stray bacteria is going to fall in, find itself at home, and take over and kill everything else. They've been working on biofuel technology for 30 years and most of the best prospects have ended in infection. If they are going to do genetic engineering on these guys, I think the time would be better spent evolving antibacterial production/resistance. Probably this has been tried already, but I didn't run across any papers for it last I checked.
EXPTIME = Union (over k) TIME(2^n^k). This means that, were we to expand the the number of spaces on a chess board from 8x8 to 9x9 to... to nxn it would become exponentially more complex with every step. All problems in EXPTIME are equally complex, so can be reduced to each other. So, if Deep Blue were generalized to play nxn chess, you could write a program that could (very quickly!) convert each Go move to a Chess move and ask Deep Blue what to do.
There are several basic classes of complexity: POLYNOMIAL TIME, Nondeterministic POLYNOMIAL TIME, POLYNOMIAL SPACE, EXPTIME, etc... The easiest way to understand these is to see what kinds of problems they each contain.
Checking if something is alphabatized is in P - you can just go straight through and do it. Factoring Primes is NP-Complete -- you have to try every combination to find a factorization Checkers and Othello are PSPACE-Complete -- every possible move leads to a completely different set of subsequent moves, but pieces can't be removed (othello) or game play is just too simple (checkers). Chess and Go are EXPTIME-Complete -- spaces can be filled, emptied, and refilled. Something about KO in Go makes it EXPTIME-Complete (and not just PSPACE-Complete).
Hopefully all that made some sense. If not well, it took a whole class (possibly the hardest CS class I've had) before it all made sense to me.
So Go is only harder for the computer because it has a higher branching factor, or basically because it's on a 19x19 board instead of 8x8. The article says the branching factor is 25-35 for chess and around 240 for go.
A couple questions I have is 1) How many possible games are there? I'd guess Go has on the order of 361!. I think the number for chess has been figured out... anyone know? 2)More interestingly, is Go a harder game than Chess for humans? Or are they both so obscenely complex that our pattern-matching/heuristic skills take over and perform the calculations necessary to play well in either game?
The practical application of this being that, if you could write a game that both solved a problem and was fun (and was bundled) you would could have your own Human Distributed.Net.
Which of course sounds completely unrealistic, but hey, IBM just made a Quantum Computer, right?
Now that the hype from the World Trade Center "lets go kill some terrorists" hype is dying down, the military returns to researching new recruitment techniques. We find our greatest influx comming from gamers, and we intend to demonstrate that the military is the ultimate experience. In other news, the Air Force is assisting in the development of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2005 to include some of the newest aircraft in order to give, "product placement and early training," to future recruits.
If Nasa sends these up at all (due to the cosmic ray problem, but maybe they can find sufficient shielding) they just won't send up untested chips. Chips will be built where every connection will be tested and mapped; they can then certify the chip is fully functional. Just like chip fabs have to do now...chips are all tested before they even leave the assembly line...and multiple times before they reach the consumer.
unaware, you purchase a new computer, with magick phoenix bios... ... being super-geek, you install linux w/o ever booting to Win98... ... everything properly installed, you plug your new server in and go to bed... ... only to wake up in the middle of the night to
the sound of doom... ... and a bright windows interface finishing installation.
Your heresy was detected, Windows reinstalled from on-board memory, you've been reported to the proper authorities, and your email address sold to spammers.
I have to ask this. Are you seriously contending here that the American Way is better? That, as you strongly imply, 'westernizing' could be substituted for 'developing' or 'improving' or 'growing up' in this quote?
I didn't intend to imply that America is supreme. However, when it comes to work environments, it's doing better than Japan, and the Japanese people are "waking up" to the fact that they don't have to take that shit anymore. But nothing would disspoint me more than if Japan were simply to slide into being a baby America. The 'group mentality' of the society is what I cherish most about my experience here.
First off let's get real about the situation, no one is forced to work anywhere, well at least not in the United States. If a company you're working for places you in situations like these, then you are the idiot for staying there at any case. There are jobs out there and anyone who says there aren't is probably under qualified to move along unto another company that is going to treat them better.
It's unfortunate that you are unfamiliar with other countries' business practices and can get modded up for an exagerated but boldly-stated dismissal. The job situation in Japan is not what it is in America. In fact, it's my impression that no other country pampers their IT the way we get pampered, but I'll stick to what I know.
In Japan, when you join a company, the job is your life. Your friends and family are distant second. 10-12 hour days are the norm. You skip lunch and dinner not infrequently. If you leave at 5, they look at you funny, as though you're not a team player. And, if you're not a team player, you don't get promoted or get raises.
It's virtually impossible to get fired, but I can think of better things to do than languish in an entry level position my entire life. Moving to a new job is difficult, because a primary virtue is Loyalty, and if you quit your old job, how can they expect you to be Loyal to them?
The Japanese are in the process of westernizing to a more individual society. People are just now daring to try to change jobs, and wondering exactly why the hell they're spending so much time on the job. Management is starting to notice this, and I expect they're a bit panicky. Which is unfortunate.
They have a long way to go before they arrive at America's freedom. When I leave work at 8, at least half my office is still here chugging right along. There's nothing like working in Japan for a while to make you appreciate American Corporate Culture. I'm more than looking forward to getting back home.
Current LCD's don't emit their own light, and block 66% of the backlight in them, so they're big bulky and inefficient. The Organics emit their own light, so should be half the weight at 1/3 the power consumption. Organics, at mass production quantities, are projected at about 1/2 the cost of LCD's. They're higher contrast, better resolution, and low self interference as well.
Finally my laptop won't look all fuzzy all the time!
It appears that Amazon eventually noticed the inconsistency between the product the the privacy policy. Aparantly, it was (unsurprisingly) more profitable and easier to just ammend the privacy policy.
From Richard Smith, with the University of Denver's Privacy Foundation: "I think they needed to come down harder in this case," Smith said. "I found (Amazon's response) kind of strange. They should have just changed their software to work how the privacy policy said it worked."
The FTC doesn't have a lot of room though anyway. The software in question (the comparison shopping service zBubbles) is now unused, and the privacy policy has been "corrected".
Jamie Zawinski of Netscape fame has an interesting post about wrist pain on his personal web site. However, a lot of the advice can be applied to back pain as well. He talks about chiropractors and acupuncture and ergonomics and all kinds of good stuff. That, and part of his site are so damn funny you'll just forget about your back pain.
Signals Intelligence and Ground Electronic Warfare equipment that is set up to do an unmanned monitor generally scans pseudo-randomly, looking for interesting patterns. When something sufficiently interesting happens, the equipment will alert a human operator, who can investigate, and respond as needed (ie. give that pattern/transmission/etc a higher priority to be monitored.)
However, as traffic grows and grows, they'll only be able to heuristically/pseudorandomly monitor a smaller and smaller portion of the traffic. Theoretically it would grow so small as to become an insignificant ammount.
Imagine this sort of scheme. All they really need to do is store all the possibly informative traffic and then randomly scan that. This is probably mostly text, which is tiny and relatively easily scanned. Things like live porn and back episodes of southpark can be safely ignored. To do this, they have to search though this fat pipe and check every packet to see whether it contains part of an e-mail. Even better, they should check it's source/destination IPs. With bandwidth growing like it is, they won't even be able to do that. So even if they know Mr. Russia and Mr. China are planning something nasty, they can't even reliably catch all the data transmitted between them. Unless it's important enough to plant bugs right at their house.
I suppose America just has to hope for few enough terrorists that we can bug them all properly. I of course hope for that already, but Mr. Bush hasn't spent a lot of time making friends lately, and the fear seems to be more towards lots of smaller, disorganized, hard to bug terrorist groups than anything else.
The problem (blessing) is there is little chance of the NSA sorting through all the data. According to the article, the first cable laid back in 1988 was carrying 40,000 simultaneous phone calls. A cable planned for this summer are equivalent to 100 million phone calls. At a 56K modem each, that's like 5000 TB of data/second.
So they're going to build a room to drop to the bottom of the ocean, splice a cable, and then hold a computer cluster to process the data?
Unless they are interested in very targetted ip's or other easily sorted packets, it'll be huge and costly. Anything interesting will probably be encrypted anyway, so they have to add a couple orders of magnitude of computer power for that.
Or maybe they are going to run their own fiber bundle back to dry land? Govornment agencies don't have quite that kind of budget.
Even if they can get reasonable results right now, Bandwidth usage is growing faster than processing power. They won't be able to keep up for much longer. And then eventually they will be caught, causing all the cable companies to search their entire lines for more taps, pissing off innumerable foreign countries.
Oh, yeah, because they like to know what they have on their hard drive. I even maintain directory structures of artist->album and then title everything Artist - Album - Track - Track Title. This is all listed as from CDDB, like most MP3s produced with automated CD->MP3 software. Therefore, exact search strings of my Napster listings for Artist->Song matches would be perfect. Now, is everyone else this Anal?
Frequently, Anal enough. Am I going to download Metalica - Enter Sandman and then title it Metal Band - Here Comes the Sand Dude? no Now, am I going to download my friend's mp3's and retitle them Metalica - Enter Sandman???? am I?
Now, their search engine might be broken or overly general, but if I find "Metalica" and "Enter Sandman" in the title of an MP3, odds are 10000 to 1 that's what song it is.
Second, talk to your advisor. This is invaluable. They will be able to explain the your different options (or point you to someone who can).
Actually, advisors seem fairly useless. At The University of Texas anyway, they were always a waste of time. I'm not saying this out of childhood spite either. They don't know the curriculum and will just read from the flowchart when suggesting courses or a major. Go see what they have to offer, but don't expect much help.
A far better idea is to join the ACM which is applicable to any major and looks good on the resume. Your school's ACM should have some good socialization opportunities, and you should use these during your first year to meet as many upper classman as you can.
Find one who knows his shit (not necessarily the person who gets straight A's mind you) and ask what he/she think about the curriculum and everything. If you find the right person, he/she will know what's up better than any Advisor and half the Faculty as well.
The amount of CD's they have sold proves nothing. The only way to determine whether or not napster had an adverse efect would be to have an alternate universe in which Napster did not exist
Actually, we can get a reasonable estimate by drawing a theoretical growth curve of where the music industries profits should have been at this year, and comparing them to where they actually are. I think the RIAA knows that too, and have made it very difficult to find these numbers, as I can't seem to come up with them.
This isn't exact, but good enough for at least a general impression. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Learnin' from each other's knowin,
I was pretty bored of X-files there for a couple seasons, but now that they're not taking themselves seriously, I usually love it. I mean, come on, COPS X-Files! Yeah!
This episode was pretty vile though.
Bodies getting sucked into the game world
No backup copies of anything
Programs jaunting across disks meshing with other programs (well, they were running Windows)
12 volt shocks in the suits to keep you "dead"
Refusal by grame programmers to turn off the system in order to save a couple measly human lives
Non-Existence of a POWER SWITCH
That girl was soooo not a programmer
Oh well, maybe next time. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Learnin' from each other's knowin,
Slashdot Mirror
Before making the big leap into opengl and such, you can make a simpler step into fully programmatic computer animations, either with Processing or Happy Fun Coding.
<quote><p>Oh, and don't buy Apple... unless "cool" is worth a ~100% tax to you.</p></quote>
/. once a year is good for the soul.
Or unless you want an operating system that is reliable, usable, pretty, is a System 7 Certified Unix, does everything you need linux for, still has the major office and productivity packages of Windows (no, Open Office and The Gimp are not adequate replacements), has reliable and well architected hardware, connects seamlessly to WIFI without me even having to think about it, is largely untargetted by viruses (at least through obscurity), automagically supports most every peripheral I've plugged into it, and generally Just Works. Spending $2k to upgrade my laptop every 3 years is worth every penny to me. And that's making 24k/year as a graduate student.
I use OS X on my laptop, Linux on my servers/clusters, and Windows when I have to (database, webserver, a few specialty aps).
Yes, it has drawbacks. It's not as configurable as some people would like (same could be said of linux and windows). It doesn't have ALL the major games (though still a good number if you're not picky). You have to buy right after refresh, as christian.ost says, to get the best value for hardware (and don't ever buy RAM from apple, holy cow overpriced). I don't particularly like Apple as a company (especially their mobile division), but it's not like I'm a big fan of Microsoft, HP, Toshiba, or anyone else either.
OK, feeling better now. Having a flamewar on
While recovering the maximal amount of biofuel from your algae population is certainly a problem, it's not the reason we're not using biofuels in mass. The reason for that is that when you have a giant tank of food (many football fields for comercial factories), eventually a stray bacteria is going to fall in, find itself at home, and take over and kill everything else. They've been working on biofuel technology for 30 years and most of the best prospects have ended in infection. If they are going to do genetic engineering on these guys, I think the time would be better spent evolving antibacterial production/resistance. Probably this has been tried already, but I didn't run across any papers for it last I checked.
cysteine, B1, and vitamin C
is to create a Tivo Fund where we buy Tivos for all our elected officials?
Go and Chess are EXPTIME-complete. (when generalized to an nxn board). http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/cgt/hard.html
EXPTIME = Union (over k) TIME(2^n^k). This means that, were we to expand the the number of spaces on a chess board from 8x8 to 9x9 to ... to nxn it would become exponentially more complex with every step. All problems in EXPTIME are equally complex, so can be reduced to each other. So, if Deep Blue were generalized to play nxn chess, you could write a program that could (very quickly!) convert each Go move to a Chess move and ask Deep Blue what to do.
There are several basic classes of complexity: POLYNOMIAL TIME, Nondeterministic POLYNOMIAL TIME, POLYNOMIAL SPACE, EXPTIME, etc... The easiest way to understand these is to see what kinds of problems they each contain.
Checking if something is alphabatized is in P - you can just go straight through and do it.
Factoring Primes is NP-Complete -- you have to try every combination to find a factorization
Checkers and Othello are PSPACE-Complete -- every possible move leads to a completely different set of subsequent moves, but pieces can't be removed (othello) or game play is just too simple (checkers).
Chess and Go are EXPTIME-Complete -- spaces can be filled, emptied, and refilled. Something about KO in Go makes it EXPTIME-Complete (and not just PSPACE-Complete).
Hopefully all that made some sense. If not well, it took a whole class (possibly the hardest CS class I've had) before it all made sense to me.
So Go is only harder for the computer because it has a higher branching factor, or basically because it's on a 19x19 board instead of 8x8. The article says the branching factor is 25-35 for chess and around 240 for go.
A couple questions I have is
1) How many possible games are there? I'd guess Go has on the order of 361!. I think the number for chess has been figured out... anyone know?
2)More interestingly, is Go a harder game than Chess for humans? Or are they both so obscenely complex that our pattern-matching/heuristic skills take over and perform the calculations necessary to play well in either game?
Which of course sounds completely unrealistic, but hey, IBM just made a Quantum Computer, right?
Now that the hype from the World Trade Center "lets go kill some terrorists" hype is dying down, the military returns to researching new recruitment techniques. We find our greatest influx comming from gamers, and we intend to demonstrate that the military is the ultimate experience. In other news, the Air Force is assisting in the development of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2005 to include some of the newest aircraft in order to give, "product placement and early training," to future recruits.
If Nasa sends these up at all (due to the cosmic ray problem, but maybe they can find sufficient shielding) they just won't send up untested chips. Chips will be built where every connection will be tested and mapped; they can then certify the chip is fully functional. Just like chip fabs have to do now...chips are all tested before they even leave the assembly line...and multiple times before they reach the consumer.
Your heresy was detected, Windows reinstalled from on-board memory, you've been reported to the proper authorities, and your email address sold to spammers.
a benevolent dictator beats a corrupt democracy any day.
...Tivo and Thinkgeek have an advertisement which is paying for their own defamation.
Or maybe there is no bad publicity?
I didn't intend to imply that America is supreme. However, when it comes to work environments, it's doing better than Japan, and the Japanese people are "waking up" to the fact that they don't have to take that shit anymore. But nothing would disspoint me more than if Japan were simply to slide into being a baby America. The 'group mentality' of the society is what I cherish most about my experience here.
It's unfortunate that you are unfamiliar with other countries' business practices and can get modded up for an exagerated but boldly-stated dismissal. The job situation in Japan is not what it is in America. In fact, it's my impression that no other country pampers their IT the way we get pampered, but I'll stick to what I know.
In Japan, when you join a company, the job is your life. Your friends and family are distant second. 10-12 hour days are the norm. You skip lunch and dinner not infrequently. If you leave at 5, they look at you funny, as though you're not a team player. And, if you're not a team player, you don't get promoted or get raises.
It's virtually impossible to get fired, but I can think of better things to do than languish in an entry level position my entire life. Moving to a new job is difficult, because a primary virtue is Loyalty, and if you quit your old job, how can they expect you to be Loyal to them?
The Japanese are in the process of westernizing to a more individual society. People are just now daring to try to change jobs, and wondering exactly why the hell they're spending so much time on the job. Management is starting to notice this, and I expect they're a bit panicky. Which is unfortunate.
They have a long way to go before they arrive at America's freedom. When I leave work at 8, at least half my office is still here chugging right along. There's nothing like working in Japan for a while to make you appreciate American Corporate Culture. I'm more than looking forward to getting back home.
Current LCD's don't emit their own light, and block 66% of the backlight in them, so they're big bulky and inefficient. The Organics emit their own light, so should be half the weight at 1/3 the power consumption. Organics, at mass production quantities, are projected at about 1/2 the cost of LCD's. They're higher contrast, better resolution, and low self interference as well.
Finally my laptop won't look all fuzzy all the time!
From Richard Smith, with the University of Denver's Privacy Foundation: "I think they needed to come down harder in this case," Smith said. "I found (Amazon's response) kind of strange. They should have just changed their software to work how the privacy policy said it worked."
The FTC doesn't have a lot of room though anyway. The software in question (the comparison shopping service zBubbles) is now unused, and the privacy policy has been "corrected".
http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/wrists.html
However, as traffic grows and grows, they'll only be able to heuristically/pseudorandomly monitor a smaller and smaller portion of the traffic. Theoretically it would grow so small as to become an insignificant ammount.
Imagine this sort of scheme. All they really need to do is store all the possibly informative traffic and then randomly scan that. This is probably mostly text, which is tiny and relatively easily scanned. Things like live porn and back episodes of southpark can be safely ignored. To do this, they have to search though this fat pipe and check every packet to see whether it contains part of an e-mail. Even better, they should check it's source/destination IPs. With bandwidth growing like it is, they won't even be able to do that. So even if they know Mr. Russia and Mr. China are planning something nasty, they can't even reliably catch all the data transmitted between them. Unless it's important enough to plant bugs right at their house.
I suppose America just has to hope for few enough terrorists that we can bug them all properly. I of course hope for that already, but Mr. Bush hasn't spent a lot of time making friends lately, and the fear seems to be more towards lots of smaller, disorganized, hard to bug terrorist groups than anything else.
So they're going to build a room to drop to the bottom of the ocean, splice a cable, and then hold a computer cluster to process the data? Unless they are interested in very targetted ip's or other easily sorted packets, it'll be huge and costly. Anything interesting will probably be encrypted anyway, so they have to add a couple orders of magnitude of computer power for that.
Or maybe they are going to run their own fiber bundle back to dry land? Govornment agencies don't have quite that kind of budget.
Even if they can get reasonable results right now, Bandwidth usage is growing faster than processing power. They won't be able to keep up for much longer. And then eventually they will be caught, causing all the cable companies to search their entire lines for more taps, pissing off innumerable foreign countries.
The spy business ain't what it used to be.
90% of the CPU will be consumed between the first 100 people who jumped on to add some Big Iron to their DNET and SETI scores.
Frequently, Anal enough. Am I going to download Metalica - Enter Sandman and then title it Metal Band - Here Comes the Sand Dude? no Now, am I going to download my friend's mp3's and retitle them Metalica - Enter Sandman???? am I?
Now, their search engine might be broken or overly general, but if I find "Metalica" and "Enter Sandman" in the title of an MP3, odds are 10000 to 1 that's what song it is.
Actually, advisors seem fairly useless. At The University of Texas anyway, they were always a waste of time. I'm not saying this out of childhood spite either. They don't know the curriculum and will just read from the flowchart when suggesting courses or a major. Go see what they have to offer, but don't expect much help.
A far better idea is to join the ACM which is applicable to any major and looks good on the resume. Your school's ACM should have some good socialization opportunities, and you should use these during your first year to meet as many upper classman as you can.
Find one who knows his shit (not necessarily the person who gets straight A's mind you) and ask what he/she think about the curriculum and everything. If you find the right person, he/she will know what's up better than any Advisor and half the Faculty as well.
Actually, we can get a reasonable estimate by drawing a theoretical growth curve of where the music industries profits should have been at this year, and comparing them to where they actually are. I think the RIAA knows that too, and have made it very difficult to find these numbers, as I can't seem to come up with them.
This isn't exact, but good enough for at least a general impression.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Learnin' from each other's knowin,
Perhaps the Gnu Regular Expression Library for Java would be of some use.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Learnin' from each other's knowin,
This episode was pretty vile though.
Oh well, maybe next time.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Learnin' from each other's knowin,