This has worked for me... Just make sure you set the properties for the generic postscript driver to "optimize for portability". Otherwise most programs that chew on postscript won't be able to read it.
How about the people that kidnap kids, rape them, kill them, and then bury them in their backyard? Aren't they almost entirely middle-aged white males? You know, quiet, keep to themselves.
Maybe we should keep a database of quiet, middle-aged white men... Was anyone surprised when those two girls' bodies were recently found in Oregon, buried in a white guy's backyard?
So wait a minute... You're telling me that the Boston Tea-Party was terrorism?
Here's what I don't like... A bunch of violent thugs kill a bunch of civilians. This is called terrorism -- presumably because the "terrorists" were trying to "terrorize" someone to achieve some political goal. So then, someone makes the case that terrorism is a really bad thing (because just look at all the mutilated bodies), and therefore we need to weaken constitutional protections for accused and proven terrorists. Everyone wants to stomp out terrorism because it's clearly such a bad thing (just look at the mutilated bodies), so they go along with the weakened protections and stricter laws. Ah, now that everyone is on board, we extend the definition of terrorism. It's no longer blowing human bodies to bits for a political goal. It's also damaging or taking control of property. And it's not just that, but it is threatening to do such a thing or conspiring to do such a thing. So now breaking windows is terrorism, spraypainting sidewalks is terrorism, blocking streets is terrorism, sitting on the sidewalk is terrorism, and so on. And, uh, terrorism is no longer bad because of the mutilated bodies and the "terrorizing" of the civilian population, but rather, terrorism is bad because you are breaking a law in hopes of changing policy.
See, there is a big difference between something being being illegal and something being "terrorism". And if you make the punishment much more severe and limit the accused rights merely because of their political intentions, then you are violating their human rights. If a patriotic republican jaywalks just for the heck of it and they get a $10 ticket, but a dissident jaywalks to join a protest march and gets pepper-sprayed and thrown in jail for a few days in addition to the $10 ticket, something is wrong. Clearly, the $10 ticket is for the jaywalking, while the violent attack and imprisonment is punishment for trying to change government policy.
And the fact is that illegal protest has been a fundamental part of every positive social change. Yes, it's true, you don't have a right to jaywalk without getting a fine. But you do have the right to be punished for your crimes and not for your ideas.
Imagine you were 20 years old in 1914 just before the outbreak of WWI. Imagine coming up with a plan 30 years in the future. Now, think about what happened in the world in those 30 years. WWI, the russian revolution, the great depression, the labor unrest of the 30's, the outbreak of WWII, the invention of computers and TVs, the rise of airplanes and cars, the invention of the atomic bomb.
Pick any 30 year period and you'll see that a whole lot of stuff happened that few people at the time ever imagined. And there's no reason to believe that history has stopped -- wars, economic crises, revolutionary inventions, etc. will continue to happen.
So while it is good to have a plan for 30 years in the future, it's also important to realize that you will scrap your plan and reform it more than once.
While it's true most companies try to get you to sign away everything in contracts, there is hope. First, as some people are suggesting, you can try to not sign such contracts or offer your own language. Second, in many states you have certain inalienable rights -- meaning you can't sign them away regardless what your employer tries to tell you.
If you live in a state that does not recognize your rights, you're left with what's in the contract. Of course, many people aren't confident enough to individually bargain such details of their contract, and many companies have a strict policy of one policy for all employees. What to do in that case? Well, your options are to find another employer or to collectively bargain a contract, or to collectively try to get a law passed to recognize your rights.
How does one collectively bargain a contract or collectively work to get a law passed? Well, you get together with coworkers and other in the same industry and either pressure employers to get them to the bargaining table or you lobby politicians to get a bill. Call me a cynic, but given that your employer and top management has more money than all the employees put together, I wouldn't count on getting a law passed by traditional $lobbying$. Either way, though, what we're talking about is a union. I'd recommend checking out WashTech or the IWW.
So, while most rasterizers are indeed O(n) in the number of geometric primitives, a raytracer or other retained-mode renderer could be "O(n + log(n))", if you count the I/O required to read the scene and build the in-memory representation!
It's not that bad, but there are definitely some unsolved issues with raytracing. If the scene is entirely static and you're just doing a fly-through, then all the processing of the scene can be done beforehand and it truly is O(LogN) regardless of camera movement. The problem is that as you get more and more dynamic objects, you need to update their position in the bounding hierarchy. If your scene is a random collection of tiny triangles all flying around randomly at high speed, then it all breaks down and you might as well give up and do something that is O(N) rather than some sort of NLogN reconstruction of the hierarchy. But if the number of moving objects is small and/or they are moving slowly compared to their size, and each moving object tends to be a collection of polygons that move as a unit (say, an animated character), then updating the hierarchy isn't so expensive, and much of the work can be done as needed. Then, you certainly don't need to have O(N) IO time.
Already, if you have enough polygons, raytracing is faster than rasterization. The only problem is that the crossover point for interactive frame rates hasn't been reached yet. Check out some of the current research in intereactive raytracing.
Basically, the explanation is that rasterization takes a time proportional to the number of polygons to render a frame, while raytracing takes time proportional to the log of the number of polygons. That might make you think raytracing should be always faster, which it clearly isn't -- the reason it isn't is that the constant factor in each is very different. So you have a*N vs b*log(N), where b is much bigger than a. As N gets bigger (apparently in the neighborhood of 10 million polygons), the difference between a and b becomes less important than the difference between N and log(N).
The main benefits of raytracing over rasterizing is that it is very easy to get things like reflections, shadows, refraction, and other important effects with raytracing, but with rasterizing, you need to do a lot of complicate and CPU-intensive hacks to get the same effect. Another benefit is that raytracing is parallelizable while rasterization generally isn't. That means that if you have a raytracing accelerator card in your PC, you can nearly double the frame rate or resolution by adding a second raytracing card.
Of course, it's all a chicken-and-egg sort of thing, nobody's going to buy a raytracing card until it's a cheap way to do the rendering they want, and it won't be available unless there is a market. Fortunately, there is research into using the next generation of rasterizing graphics cards to greatly speed up raytracing. This will help bridge the gap, by making raytraced games possible using soon-to-be-existing hardware.
If you look over the past 100 years, to see where technology was used to further mass killing and suffering, the "terrorists" aren't even a blip on the radar. Even Sept 11th was pretty minor compared to all but the smallest of wars.
You'd think scientists would be more concerned with preventing their work being used for another Nazi hollocaust, the nuking of civillian populations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the repression of millions under Stalin.
Or maybe they've already given up hope and figure it would be better their work is used by the next Hitler to kill millions than by the next Bin Laden to kill thousands.
H1B visas are not an example of free trade. By enforcing restrictions on the workers brought over and being very lax in enforcement of restrictions on companies, what you get are artificially depressed wages. It's very simple economics - a foreign worker would gladly take $20/hour in the U.S. over $5/hour or less back home. And once they accept the job, they have no bargaining power to increase their wage to the industry standard in the U.S. If they had a green card, they could threaten to quit and find another job in the U.S. But with an H1B visa, they could be deported (or worse) if they quit. And if one worker accepts artificially low wages, that affects all of our wages.
As for free trade benefitting "the economies" of both countries... I am not an economy, and neither are you. What benefits the economy and what benefits me are not necessarily the same thing. In economics, "efficiency" is generally seen to "benefit the economy". And efficiency means getting more for less. If my boss can get me to get more work done for less money, that's efficient for the company. On the other hand, if I can do less work for more money, that is efficient for my labor.
The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.
He certainly didn't see any contradiction fighting against Fascism, Stalinism and Capitalism. To him, they were different forms of the same thing.
I highly recommend reading Homage To Catalonia if you want some better insight into Orwell.
He wasn't writing about technology leading to totalitarianism. He was writing about the growth of totalitarianism with technology being just part of the picture.
It's especially crazy that they would write now about how mistaken Orwell was. Last year, it might have made some sense, but now... Nearly every day I hear about more and more moves by the U.S. government to loosen restrictions on police to spy on U.S. citizens. Also, there's talk about an American Empire -- how the U.S. government should rightly rule over the rest of the world, and from "mainstream" intellectuals rather than extremists.
The fact that the U.S. government is using technology to move towards totalitarianism does not mean that technology is the important ingredient. And, of course, the fact that many Americans are responding to the propaganda they're being innundated with by calling for more security doesn't suggest the absence of totalitarianism. When the Reichstag burned, most Germans were scared and were willing to give up some of their liberty for some more security. Totalitarianism only works when the people ask for it.
The problem, though, is that there's a sort of event-horizon with liberty. There's a point beyond which you have little room for resisting. And it's possible for most people to cross it without noticing. As long as nobody is shooting at you or otherwise interfering in your life, you might not notice that some of the most effective means for radically changing government have been eliminated, and that suppression of dissidents has become so efficient and effective that effective dissent becomes impossible. When you start to see the darker side of the "security" you asked for, you find that there's no turning back. In Germany, it took the destruction of the country and the deaths of millions to unseat Hitler.
Fortunately things aren't so stark as that. Supressing dissidents is never easy, and human ingenuity has a way of somtimes finding ways around "insurmountable" problems. But I think the event-horizon analogy is appropriate, because it doesn't take large scale repression to protect power and stifle resistance. There is a point where resistance and chance of success become much more difficult, and you can easily pass that point without noticing.
Think about the economics of it for just a minute. Advertisement-driven products are not "free" in any sense except that the user doesn't give money to the producer. There is still a cost associated with use of the product, and that cost is giving up control of the product to the advertisers. In fact, the whole economic relationship is changed. Rather than being in the business of producing software for users, the developers would now be in the business of providing eyeballs to advertisers for a fee.
So what does that mean for users? Well, the incentive for the developer to make useful software for us would be like a farmer's incentive to fatten up their pigs so that they'll bring in more cash. Any features that might decrease the value of the users in the advertisers' eyes would be considered "bad for business" -- a developer wouldn't want to decrease the value of the users they're producing by allowing features that give users control over the advertisements, for example.
On the plus side, it won't work with the GPL or most other licenses. As long as users have access to the source code and are able to release modifications, the ads can be disabled, which means advertisers won't pay as much for ads.
I wasn't arguing against up front design. I was just saying that if your plan is to avoid all profiling by spending additional time in your design with an eye to speed, it won't work. If speed is important, you'll most likely end up doing profiling regardless how much time you spend on design. And if your plan on minimizing that posibility is to spend extra time optimizing all your code, then most of that effort is wasted since most of the code isn't the bottleneck.
I agree completely that good design and good coding practices will save time when it comes time for profiling and optimizations.
The flaw in your argument is that only a small portion of the code takes most of the time. If you spend a lot of time on upfront design instead of profiling, much of your effort will be wasted. 90% of the time you spend making your code fast should be spent on the 10% of the code that takes 90% of the CPU time. If you spread that out, you'll do a lot of unnecessary work speeding up code that rarely runs and have less time to optimize the code that running most of the time.
You could argue that with good up front design, you'll know in advance what 10% of the code to focus on, but I don't think that works that well in practice. At best, you're making educated guesses about where bottlenecks will appear, and you'll be wrong some of the time -- requiring profiling at that point.
And lacking tools doesn't mean you can't or won't profile -- it just means you'll have to do more work to profile the code.
I work as a game developer, and we have to make sure that everything that is done for each frame takes less than 33ms. So we're always profiling our code to cram more functionality into a limited amount of time.
But even if you aren't doing something that is speed intensive like games, you always have tradeoffs when you choose your data structures and algorithms. Generally you first code up the easiest algorithm that you think will use an acceptable amount of memory and CPU time. Then, later, if something is too slow, you have to identify where the problem is. If could be that you chose an O(N^2) algorithm not realizing that N might be 1,000 instead of the max of 100 you were counting on, forcing you to switch to an O(NlogN) algorithm that is more complex.
Now, if it is a small application, you might have enough familiarity with the code to be able to guess where the problem is -- then you fix it and see if it is still slow. If that works, then you're set and profiling isn't necessary. But if the fix doesn't speed it up enough, then you're stuck. You have to profile it somehow.
You might try simple tricks like changing the code to loop on a suspected bit of code 100 times and see how much longer it takes. Or maybe throw in some printf's that spit out the current time at different points. Or maybe create your own profiling code that you manually call in functions you want to time. Or, you might use an actual profiler without modifications to the code. But lacking a profiler doesn't mean you can't or won't profile your code.
And even with CPU speed doubling every couple of years or so, that doesn't mean speed is no longer an issue. You can easily choose the wrong algorithm and have something take 1000s of times longer to run than the proper algorithm.
Yeah, they're market driven, but you got the market wrong... The media market is selling eyeballs to advertisers. Delivering as many eyeballs as possible to their customers is very important, but also there is the fact that "the customer is always right". Ultimately, they are trying to please their corporate advertisers. And of course, one of the other raw materials is information from government officials -- piss them off and you have to find another source for information. So, given that you cur your investigative staff to save money, and you can't run stories that will piss off your sources or your customers, what do you do? You run flashy, sexy, crap. You get your eyeballs, your customers are happy, and you make lots of money.
Yeah, that's it. Let's race to the bottom. Ditch diggers shouldn't complain because there are vietnamese kids working in sweatshops, the sweatshop kids shouldn't complain because of the thai kids sold into prostitution, the thai kids shouldn't complain because china executes dissisents and sells their kidneys. blah blah blah.
Or maybe we can try to improve all our lot. I'll support any ditch digger or factory worker trying to improve their working conditions, and they have no reason not to support me.
Does anyone still work 8-5 anymore, though? I thought the average workweek in the U.S. was more like 45-50 hours.
I think some people don't understand how much work goes into making motion capture animations look good. It's not just having animators clean up the motion capture data, but your actors have to be able to do the motions right on the first take.
It would probably work for making some crappy saturday morning cartoon (I could've sworn I saw one once that was doing something like that), but for good quality animations, you need good animators.
What's more interesting is the work for physics-based animation. Again, you won't get good movies out of it, or even "realistic" human characters, but it will be a big advance for games -- though I doubt it will make a dent in the demand for good animators.
Gotta love how the game industry plays with their numbers of bits. I imagine it'll take another hardware generation or two before the marketing guys come up with another number to hype.
I'd second the recommendation to ask how the person does it by hand and just automate that. It should be straightforward to implement, blazingly fast to run, and easy to maintain.
But otherwise, I have to say that just because something is NP-complete doesn't mean you can't get the optimal solution in a reasonable amount of time. Sure, your system wouldn't scale to 10,000 people, but that's probably not a concern. If you have a good heuristic and the data is reasonable, A* might do the trick. I'm using A* for path planning and it meets my requirement that it can't take longer than 2ms to find the optimal path. It helps that my maximum path length is pretty short and the paths are usually a straight shot matching the hueristic.
I realize that worst case would be unworkable in your case, especially if you brute-force it, but I'd be surprised if you ever see anything approach the worst case.
I suggest you read the Rand report on the WTO protests in Seattle. Here's top level link to their book.
Rand is a government-funded think tank whose job is to provide an objective view to policymakers. The purpose of the book I mentioned is to inform the U.S. government of how and why the WTO meeting was shut down by activists and how to best stop them from having future successes. This report is the most comprehensive and accurate report I've seen to date. If you read it, you will see that in Seattle, police started using teargas, rubber bullets, and pepper spray against hours before any vandalism by protestors. In fact, they used teargas and pepper spray against people who had locked themselves down and were incapable of moving. Later, the police went on a rampage in section of town called Capital Hill, teargassing, clubbing, kicking, pepperspraying, firing rubber bullets, and using "flash bang" concussion grenades largely against the residents of that part of town. The Rand report says this:
The final incident of Wednesday night demonstrated that civilian
control of law enforcement ceased to exist for a time. The "Battle of
Capitol Hill" degenerated into a police riot, perhaps the only time
during the WTO protests that police command totally lost control of
their forces on the street.
That was the night a black city-council member was pulled from his car and roughed up by riot-police.
The total damage due to vandalism by either activists or opportunistic local kids ended up being less than the sales lost due to stores being closed for two days during the "state of emergency". If you put a dollar amount on the injuries from police violence, and add to it the pain and suffering of thousands of people that had their apartments filled with teargas during the police riot, you would get a much larger amount.
Now, I wasn't at any of the other gatherings of government leaders that resulted in mass protests and/or riots, but if Seattle is any indicator, I would imagine the vast majority of violence at the other cities was police violence against peaceful residents of the city hosting the meeting. With the countless people injured by police in Seattle during the WTO meeting, I have not heard of a single civillian resident of Seattle injured by someone that was not a police officer.
So you say not to blame the riot cops, but in Seattle, they truly were "riot" cops. Like the cop caught on tape using his steel toed boot to kick an unarmed resident of Capital Hill (who was backing off with his hands in the air) in the balls, resulting in serious injury. Or the cop who saw a young women videotaping him from a car so he motioned for her to roll down the window and sprayed pepper spray in her face, saying "tape this, bitch!" (fortunately he was not quite clever enough to smash her camera as is usually done, so that too was all caught on tape and shown on local TV).
I've been at a keyboard since 1978, with no thought about ergonomics until the early 90's after I first noticed problems. So, that was about 14 years with no problems. Now I have no choice but to be careful about my setup, take stretch breaks, etc. which generally keeps things ok.
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This has worked for me... Just make sure you set the properties for the generic postscript driver to "optimize for portability". Otherwise most programs that chew on postscript won't be able to read it.
Maybe we should keep a database of quiet, middle-aged white men... Was anyone surprised when those two girls' bodies were recently found in Oregon, buried in a white guy's backyard?
Here's what I don't like... A bunch of violent thugs kill a bunch of civilians. This is called terrorism -- presumably because the "terrorists" were trying to "terrorize" someone to achieve some political goal. So then, someone makes the case that terrorism is a really bad thing (because just look at all the mutilated bodies), and therefore we need to weaken constitutional protections for accused and proven terrorists. Everyone wants to stomp out terrorism because it's clearly such a bad thing (just look at the mutilated bodies), so they go along with the weakened protections and stricter laws. Ah, now that everyone is on board, we extend the definition of terrorism. It's no longer blowing human bodies to bits for a political goal. It's also damaging or taking control of property. And it's not just that, but it is threatening to do such a thing or conspiring to do such a thing. So now breaking windows is terrorism, spraypainting sidewalks is terrorism, blocking streets is terrorism, sitting on the sidewalk is terrorism, and so on. And, uh, terrorism is no longer bad because of the mutilated bodies and the "terrorizing" of the civilian population, but rather, terrorism is bad because you are breaking a law in hopes of changing policy.
See, there is a big difference between something being being illegal and something being "terrorism". And if you make the punishment much more severe and limit the accused rights merely because of their political intentions, then you are violating their human rights. If a patriotic republican jaywalks just for the heck of it and they get a $10 ticket, but a dissident jaywalks to join a protest march and gets pepper-sprayed and thrown in jail for a few days in addition to the $10 ticket, something is wrong. Clearly, the $10 ticket is for the jaywalking, while the violent attack and imprisonment is punishment for trying to change government policy.
And the fact is that illegal protest has been a fundamental part of every positive social change. Yes, it's true, you don't have a right to jaywalk without getting a fine. But you do have the right to be punished for your crimes and not for your ideas.
Pick any 30 year period and you'll see that a whole lot of stuff happened that few people at the time ever imagined. And there's no reason to believe that history has stopped -- wars, economic crises, revolutionary inventions, etc. will continue to happen.
So while it is good to have a plan for 30 years in the future, it's also important to realize that you will scrap your plan and reform it more than once.
If you live in a state that does not recognize your rights, you're left with what's in the contract. Of course, many people aren't confident enough to individually bargain such details of their contract, and many companies have a strict policy of one policy for all employees. What to do in that case? Well, your options are to find another employer or to collectively bargain a contract, or to collectively try to get a law passed to recognize your rights.
How does one collectively bargain a contract or collectively work to get a law passed? Well, you get together with coworkers and other in the same industry and either pressure employers to get them to the bargaining table or you lobby politicians to get a bill. Call me a cynic, but given that your employer and top management has more money than all the employees put together, I wouldn't count on getting a law passed by traditional $lobbying$. Either way, though, what we're talking about is a union. I'd recommend checking out WashTech or the IWW.
Basically, the explanation is that rasterization takes a time proportional to the number of polygons to render a frame, while raytracing takes time proportional to the log of the number of polygons. That might make you think raytracing should be always faster, which it clearly isn't -- the reason it isn't is that the constant factor in each is very different. So you have a*N vs b*log(N), where b is much bigger than a. As N gets bigger (apparently in the neighborhood of 10 million polygons), the difference between a and b becomes less important than the difference between N and log(N).
The main benefits of raytracing over rasterizing is that it is very easy to get things like reflections, shadows, refraction, and other important effects with raytracing, but with rasterizing, you need to do a lot of complicate and CPU-intensive hacks to get the same effect. Another benefit is that raytracing is parallelizable while rasterization generally isn't. That means that if you have a raytracing accelerator card in your PC, you can nearly double the frame rate or resolution by adding a second raytracing card.
Of course, it's all a chicken-and-egg sort of thing, nobody's going to buy a raytracing card until it's a cheap way to do the rendering they want, and it won't be available unless there is a market. Fortunately, there is research into using the next generation of rasterizing graphics cards to greatly speed up raytracing. This will help bridge the gap, by making raytraced games possible using soon-to-be-existing hardware.
You'd think scientists would be more concerned with preventing their work being used for another Nazi hollocaust, the nuking of civillian populations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the repression of millions under Stalin.
Or maybe they've already given up hope and figure it would be better their work is used by the next Hitler to kill millions than by the next Bin Laden to kill thousands.
As for free trade benefitting "the economies" of both countries... I am not an economy, and neither are you. What benefits the economy and what benefits me are not necessarily the same thing. In economics, "efficiency" is generally seen to "benefit the economy". And efficiency means getting more for less. If my boss can get me to get more work done for less money, that's efficient for the company. On the other hand, if I can do less work for more money, that is efficient for my labor.
I highly recommend reading Homage To Catalonia if you want some better insight into Orwell.
It's especially crazy that they would write now about how mistaken Orwell was. Last year, it might have made some sense, but now... Nearly every day I hear about more and more moves by the U.S. government to loosen restrictions on police to spy on U.S. citizens. Also, there's talk about an American Empire -- how the U.S. government should rightly rule over the rest of the world, and from "mainstream" intellectuals rather than extremists.
The fact that the U.S. government is using technology to move towards totalitarianism does not mean that technology is the important ingredient. And, of course, the fact that many Americans are responding to the propaganda they're being innundated with by calling for more security doesn't suggest the absence of totalitarianism. When the Reichstag burned, most Germans were scared and were willing to give up some of their liberty for some more security. Totalitarianism only works when the people ask for it.
The problem, though, is that there's a sort of event-horizon with liberty. There's a point beyond which you have little room for resisting. And it's possible for most people to cross it without noticing. As long as nobody is shooting at you or otherwise interfering in your life, you might not notice that some of the most effective means for radically changing government have been eliminated, and that suppression of dissidents has become so efficient and effective that effective dissent becomes impossible. When you start to see the darker side of the "security" you asked for, you find that there's no turning back. In Germany, it took the destruction of the country and the deaths of millions to unseat Hitler.
Fortunately things aren't so stark as that. Supressing dissidents is never easy, and human ingenuity has a way of somtimes finding ways around "insurmountable" problems. But I think the event-horizon analogy is appropriate, because it doesn't take large scale repression to protect power and stifle resistance. There is a point where resistance and chance of success become much more difficult, and you can easily pass that point without noticing.
So what does that mean for users? Well, the incentive for the developer to make useful software for us would be like a farmer's incentive to fatten up their pigs so that they'll bring in more cash. Any features that might decrease the value of the users in the advertisers' eyes would be considered "bad for business" -- a developer wouldn't want to decrease the value of the users they're producing by allowing features that give users control over the advertisements, for example.
On the plus side, it won't work with the GPL or most other licenses. As long as users have access to the source code and are able to release modifications, the ads can be disabled, which means advertisers won't pay as much for ads.
I agree completely that good design and good coding practices will save time when it comes time for profiling and optimizations.
You could argue that with good up front design, you'll know in advance what 10% of the code to focus on, but I don't think that works that well in practice. At best, you're making educated guesses about where bottlenecks will appear, and you'll be wrong some of the time -- requiring profiling at that point.
And lacking tools doesn't mean you can't or won't profile -- it just means you'll have to do more work to profile the code.
But even if you aren't doing something that is speed intensive like games, you always have tradeoffs when you choose your data structures and algorithms. Generally you first code up the easiest algorithm that you think will use an acceptable amount of memory and CPU time. Then, later, if something is too slow, you have to identify where the problem is. If could be that you chose an O(N^2) algorithm not realizing that N might be 1,000 instead of the max of 100 you were counting on, forcing you to switch to an O(NlogN) algorithm that is more complex.
Now, if it is a small application, you might have enough familiarity with the code to be able to guess where the problem is -- then you fix it and see if it is still slow. If that works, then you're set and profiling isn't necessary. But if the fix doesn't speed it up enough, then you're stuck. You have to profile it somehow.
You might try simple tricks like changing the code to loop on a suspected bit of code 100 times and see how much longer it takes. Or maybe throw in some printf's that spit out the current time at different points. Or maybe create your own profiling code that you manually call in functions you want to time. Or, you might use an actual profiler without modifications to the code. But lacking a profiler doesn't mean you can't or won't profile your code.
And even with CPU speed doubling every couple of years or so, that doesn't mean speed is no longer an issue. You can easily choose the wrong algorithm and have something take 1000s of times longer to run than the proper algorithm.
That's what I do when having problems with Internet Explorer printing. You have to make sure to select optimize for compatibility in the properties.
And that's what it's all about...
Check it out.
Or maybe we can try to improve all our lot. I'll support any ditch digger or factory worker trying to improve their working conditions, and they have no reason not to support me.
Does anyone still work 8-5 anymore, though? I thought the average workweek in the U.S. was more like 45-50 hours.
It would probably work for making some crappy saturday morning cartoon (I could've sworn I saw one once that was doing something like that), but for good quality animations, you need good animators.
What's more interesting is the work for physics-based animation. Again, you won't get good movies out of it, or even "realistic" human characters, but it will be a big advance for games -- though I doubt it will make a dent in the demand for good animators.
Gotta love how the game industry plays with their numbers of bits. I imagine it'll take another hardware generation or two before the marketing guys come up with another number to hype.
But otherwise, I have to say that just because something is NP-complete doesn't mean you can't get the optimal solution in a reasonable amount of time. Sure, your system wouldn't scale to 10,000 people, but that's probably not a concern. If you have a good heuristic and the data is reasonable, A* might do the trick. I'm using A* for path planning and it meets my requirement that it can't take longer than 2ms to find the optimal path. It helps that my maximum path length is pretty short and the paths are usually a straight shot matching the hueristic.
I realize that worst case would be unworkable in your case, especially if you brute-force it, but I'd be surprised if you ever see anything approach the worst case.
Rand is a government-funded think tank whose job is to provide an objective view to policymakers. The purpose of the book I mentioned is to inform the U.S. government of how and why the WTO meeting was shut down by activists and how to best stop them from having future successes. This report is the most comprehensive and accurate report I've seen to date. If you read it, you will see that in Seattle, police started using teargas, rubber bullets, and pepper spray against hours before any vandalism by protestors. In fact, they used teargas and pepper spray against people who had locked themselves down and were incapable of moving. Later, the police went on a rampage in section of town called Capital Hill, teargassing, clubbing, kicking, pepperspraying, firing rubber bullets, and using "flash bang" concussion grenades largely against the residents of that part of town. The Rand report says this:
That was the night a black city-council member was pulled from his car and roughed up by riot-police.The total damage due to vandalism by either activists or opportunistic local kids ended up being less than the sales lost due to stores being closed for two days during the "state of emergency". If you put a dollar amount on the injuries from police violence, and add to it the pain and suffering of thousands of people that had their apartments filled with teargas during the police riot, you would get a much larger amount.
Now, I wasn't at any of the other gatherings of government leaders that resulted in mass protests and/or riots, but if Seattle is any indicator, I would imagine the vast majority of violence at the other cities was police violence against peaceful residents of the city hosting the meeting. With the countless people injured by police in Seattle during the WTO meeting, I have not heard of a single civillian resident of Seattle injured by someone that was not a police officer.
So you say not to blame the riot cops, but in Seattle, they truly were "riot" cops. Like the cop caught on tape using his steel toed boot to kick an unarmed resident of Capital Hill (who was backing off with his hands in the air) in the balls, resulting in serious injury. Or the cop who saw a young women videotaping him from a car so he motioned for her to roll down the window and sprayed pepper spray in her face, saying "tape this, bitch!" (fortunately he was not quite clever enough to smash her camera as is usually done, so that too was all caught on tape and shown on local TV).
I've been at a keyboard since 1978, with no thought about ergonomics until the early 90's after I first noticed problems. So, that was about 14 years with no problems. Now I have no choice but to be careful about my setup, take stretch breaks, etc. which generally keeps things ok.