There's also short selling
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One can also sell short. That's the practice of selling shares you don't own at certain price when you're sure the stock will fall before the deadline on the sales contract. You then buy the stocks at the lower price once it falls, and sell at the agreed price. Some people do this with borrowed money to back the purchase.
It's possible it could be lucrative, but it's also dangerous. If you short a stock and it rises, you have to buy it at the new, higher price and sell it to your buyer at the agreed price. You're out the difference. If you make this mistake with borrowed money, you now have a portion of your loan with no collateral to back it. The loan or that unsecured portion might be called due immediately, depending on loan terms.
The safer bet is still to buy low and sell high. You can only lose the price of the stock, and the gains are theoretically unlimited. When shorting, you can only gain the difference between your short offer price and the price at which you buy. The theoretical loss is the unlimited part.
Picture this: you short before an expected fall on bad earnings data. You short at $10, and the stock falls to $7. You make $3 per share. The next time you do it, the stock rises to $22 per share because you were dead wrong about the earnings. Just imagine they signed a huge contract the day before, and the buyer paid in full the day of the earnings report (not that such a thing would happen). You're now out $12 per share and you've made an instant $12 per share gain for your buyer. Since you hadn't actually owned the shares before, you haven't collected any dividends, and the entire loss is cash and not partly ownership of the shares.
If you waited for the fall to buy and hold for gains in both cases, you could have bought at $7 and made your money slowly as the stock recovered in the first place. In the second, you could have bought at $10.50, $11, or $12 on the way up, and sold at anywhere from $12 to $22 after additional rises. You could have made up to $11.50 per share yourself, which is more than you could ever theoretically have made on shorting the $10 stock. You could only be out a maximum of $10 even if the company ceased operations and also had no salable assets at the end of the trading day.
The advantage of shorting is that if you really are sure the stock will tank, you can make the difference with no investment of your own funds. The disadvantages can be devastating if you're wrong.
Actually, I'll have to disagree. The Postal Service has competition from UPS, FedEx, DHL, the Internet, private couriers, dial-in message retrieval systems (being killed by the Net), and fax machines. They don't even handle freight shipments, for which we have road, rail, planes, boats, and combinations thereof. There certainly are private roads in this country, although they are mostly short and local. The railroads were always owned, and even Amtrak, which is highly subsidized, runs on private tracks many places.
AT&T should have been split in three. AT&T Local, Bell Long Distance, and Bell (or AT&T) hardware, which would make switches, billing systems, and phone sets. One huge local provider, one huge long distance provider, and one hardware maker. The Labs probably should have gone with the hardware people.
Then, anyone who want to play long distance provider should have been able to negotiate with the Local company on a level playing field, and should have been able to offer Long Distance rates at their cost + the interconnect with the local + markup.
Anyone who wanted to be a local provider in an area should have had full rights to buy or lease any wire AT&T Local wanted to part with (at a profit to AT&T Local), and also have full rights to pay the locality the same rates for the same right-of-way to lay cable next to AT&T's cables.
Anyone who could make inter-operating equipment should have been able to make and sell equipment to AT&T Local, to Bell Long Distance, or to businesses and consumers.
This would have allowed for the company to have been split up, for the money shifting to be clearer, for competition to have been increased, and for the large network effects to still have been possible for savings and innovations. Unix might have become a single-seller OS from the hardware people this way, but think of the data systems we could have had if there was fully-funded Bell Labs at a hardware company rather than AT&T Long Distance keeping it and screwing it.
As it was, we got Bell Labs pillaged for people and cash by the baby Bells, Unix and a bunch of other innovations turned from liberally licensed to the Novell/SCO/Santa Cruz/BayStar/Open Group/Microsoft/Berkeley/DEC Unix/OSF1/SunOS/Solaris mess, the RBOCs mostly merged together (Verizon and AT&T account for all of them now, right?) anyway, now with long distance anyway, etc.
Cell phones, if the norm was one big local company, would likely have been viewed as another way to get local service. You'd have your land line or your cell phone, and either one ties into a grid and you pay the going LD rate for your LD carrier. You could roam and still have local access to your home local area, and pay long distance per minute (or flat-rate if your LD carrier has that available). Roaming could have been negotiated among locals or even mandated by the government. It could have been a roam-for-roam agreement. Maybe you'd end up paying LD to call your home area while roaming, but just local service to call the community you're currently calling from. That'd be a fair trade when you're on the road for business and calling your local contacts a lot.
Data-only networks should get the same breaks the Bell companies have always had to lay cables and secure rights-of-way. Someone would take FTTH or at least Fiber to the Block seriously if they didn't have to negotiate rights-of-way all over again.
Municipalities should be able to offer phone and data service, just like many offer water, gas, and electric. That shouldn't exclude private companies from offering those services as well.
Springfield, Illinois, where I lived for a number of years, has its own city-owned power plant (sorry, it's not nuclear and not owned by Montgomery Burns). They sell excess power to other, smaller towns around the city. The proceeds from that go to keep prices down and offset what would require tax revenues for city residents. If the city ran fiber to every block and 10Mbit or 100Mbit Etherne
I know some people who are legitimately "big-boned".
A girl I knew in junior high and high school had about 20 inch waist, but wore a size 10 jeans and women's large or extra large shirts. Her pants were baggy at the waist, but just barely fit over her hips. Her shirts hung, but anything smaller wouldn't fit over her very broad shoulders. She's never been fat or flabby.
I have a friend who has to do pull-ups with his hands about 2 or 3 inches apart at the most, because any farther apart and his shoulder blades touch. His chest after being in Kuwait and Iraq in the desert heat wearing boy armor for months was still over 50 inches. Even when he's got nearly an fat on him, the guy's much bigger around than most people his height. He does sometimes carry some extra weight, but he's big even when he doesn't.
While it can be used as an excuse by the overweight, there really does appear to b a difference between slightly built people and people with larger frames. Keeping the muscles toned and the fat down to a healthy level is what matters. Height/weight guides and the body mass index are not a true replacement for body fat percentage. They are much easier to get data to compare against, and they work pretty well for most people, which is why they are so popular. The BMI at least gives someone an idea of the range they should be close to, even if they might end up being a little above or below that and be perfectly healthy.
The really interesting thing here is that TSP with one photon per route really would be O(n!). The article says they need a higher power on the reference light to make detection feasible, and it's the power of the reference light which dominates photon input concerns. Besides, cutting all that fiber and making all those junctions isn't exactly fast or general-purpose.
So this means we could really do the same thing with n! threads or processes each running on a core and a min() function just after almost as fast. Of course, 100! is still really big. Heck, 10! is over 3.6 million.
With a 64 core box, you're looking at 57,600 routes per core to figure for 10 cities. If you figure 10 register sets, a jump to the routine, 5 swaps, 9 adds, and one return, you're looking at 26 cycles plus any additional overhead like memory waits. 26 * 57,600 = 1,474,200. So let's assume a bunch of overhead, and call it 2.9 million instructions (about double). Then, there's finding the min of 3,628,800 results. That'd be, in a very naive implementation, 3,628,799 comparisons. Let's double that, so 7.2 million. Let's add these, for 2.9 million + 7.2 million (because the comparisons are being done very naively on a single processor after the route lengths have been done on the separate cores). 2.9 + 7.2 is about 10.1 million (I've rounded a few times, and thrown in some wild estimates, so forget about precision). How long does it take to burn through 10.1 million cycles? Well, on a machine that does one instruction per clock and has a conservative 2Ghz clock on every core, not very long at all. However, even though we're not too many years from having 64 cores in a typical mid-range rack-mount server, I can think of much better uses for that kind of power.
2,432,902,008,176,640,000 is 20!... so 38,014,093,877,760,000 per core on a 64-core box. That's 988,366,440,821,760,000 instructions run per core according to the earlier estimate, and doubling gets us 1,976,732,881,643,520,000. At 2GHz, we're looking at around 988,366,441 seconds on the multi-core part of the previous example. That's a bit over 31 years. The rest of this example is left as an exercise for the reader.
The heuristic approaches to find good approximations of the NP Complete problems are usually very much good enough. Also, since it's possible to check whether or not a given solution to an NP Complete problem is the ideal solution in polynomial time, a few iterations of a good heuristic or two with a double-check at the end is probably still the best way to go even for finding the very best path until quantum systems are feasible for this type of application.
This photon interference idea using variable-length optical fibers is a neat trick, but unfortunately that's all it's likely to ever be.
There's a certification mark that confirms something is an Audio CD. No silver disk that's not Red Book standard can legally carry that certification mark. The music and tech companies behind the Red Book format themselves made it that way, so that incompatible disks from other parties could not be labeled as compatible. Now guess who wants to sell you things contrary to the agreements they signed on that format?
Yeah, about 65% of that being Blu0Ray, and 35% HD-DVD. I can't seem to find the regular DVD numbers.
By comparison, The Matrix sold 750,000 DVD copies in the same timeframe. So Blu-Ray and HD-DVD combined still have a way to go I think. Neither format is the improvement over DVD that DVD was over VHS, so slower uptake I think should be expected.
Sure, higher def audio and video makes a big difference, but with DVD vs. VHS there was random/sequential, digital/analog, optical/magnetic, thin and flat/bulky, rigid spinning/tugged along on a spool.
I think all signs point to Blu-Ray ramping up nicely, but still being in the ramp-up stage. With Japanese porn and lots of American mainstream studios pushing Blu-Ray, it will probably beat HD-DVD to the video crown. I just don't think we're at the end of the ramp-up yet.
Speaking of FreeBSD and MySQL, does FreeBSD's threading still kill MySQL performance? I know there's been some work on the whole issue, but I haven't followed all of it.
tail -f would only need to seek to the end of the file periodically and see if there's anything to read. In fact, some implementations close the file, re-open it, then seek to the end of the file. That allows other programs to actually write to the file that's being tailed even if there's an implicit lock (like on Windows).
GNU tail does some nice things like detecting if the inode has changed and opening the new file in place of the old one. That helps with some things like log rotation during the tail. I also saw just now some mtime, device, mode, and filesize checks, but nothing to do with atime.
I think the idea was that he kept the pics after the new girlfriend became the new girlfriend. That upsets some people.
Some will think it's just nice to have nudie pics, even if they are of an ex. If you're sure your SO isn't looking at them longingly and wishing to have the ex instead of you, it might be alright that the pics stay around.
I'm surprised that he'd want to confront her if they both think it's okay for him to have them and look at them, though. She is probably just wondering if she measures up, wondering why he likes seeing the naked body of his ex when he has the new girlfriend, etc. Even if she's not insecure and confrontational about it, those are valid reasons for her to be curious.
On the very bright side, it may mean his new girlfriend is thinking about being into guys and girls and might be open for a threesome. That's something he might not want to screw up by bitching about her attractions.
If it's a recursive ls (ls -R) and there are a lot of directories, it might make a difference. There's still reason to suspect caching made the difference, though.
A handful of early adopters is not a sizable market. You're just subsidizing manufacturing line refreshes and ramp-up that will give the rest of us the same stuff for half as much in two years or so. Thanks for that, BTW.
Actually, I misread the article. It's not one photon. It isn't necessarily n**n, either. It's proportional to n**n. To be precise, it looks like 5/64 * n**n.
That's still a lot, but it's far fewer than n**n.
Still, it does seem that it limits it to the "neat trick" category.
Good thing they were talking about a single photon being split and traveling all possible paths simultaneously, and measuring the interference, then.
Still, they say that for larger problem sets the SNR makes detection and filtering too difficult. Larger problem sets are precisely where one worries the most about computational complexity, of course. So it's still, at least for now, just a neat trick.
This is probably the most intelligent discussion of how the Internet and music distribution intertwine that I've seen as text. Thanks for putting this on Slashdot. Now, if we could just get this in front of regular people.
It's Mandriva 2006, which would normally be installed with 5 as the default runlevel. It's at runlevel 3 on boot because I often use it remotely or from the CLI and only start up X as needed. My wife was bored one day at the office, so it now has TuxRacer on it, and she's learned how to manually start X.org in order to play.
Exactly. If Google buys (leases, really) the spectrum, and Sprint does the build-out (for which they already have towers and network capacity, and would just need some upgrades and new transceivers on the towers) then Google is left holding nothing. Nothing up on the towers to take back down, nothing corroding and getting blown down, nothing to depreciate, and nothing to sell as scrap if the spectrum goes away.
In the meantime, Google services Sprint's customers with Google content and Google ads, and charges out the ass for ads on all of that. Sprint offers the best bandwidth for non-line-of-sight there is in the realm of internet access, and gets to piggyback on Google's bandwidth lease at dirt cheap rates.
That's all assuming Google wouldn't win the bid again when the spectrum comes up for its next auction.
This is the year of the Windows, Mac, and Linux desktops running side by side on a single geek's desk, while his mom, sister, brother-in-law, sister-in-law, and other brother-in-law and half his friends run only Windows. His grandmother and some of his aunts and uncles don't touch a computer, ever, if they can help it. His dad runs Unreal Tournament, Doom, and sometimes Axis and Allies on Windows 98 hoping he won't cause a massive crash. His wife runs Linux well enough to log in, type startx, play tuxracer, shutdown X, and log out.
FYI, Sturgeon's Law is, basically, "90% of everything is crud".
By saying that rap abides by Sturgeon's Law, that implies that 90% of rap is crud, while 10% is good or at least worthwhile.
It's also the same for every other genre of music, for video games (or software in general), for cars, for restaurants, for books, or for shoes. 90% of all of it is crud, and only 10% or so is worth even considering.
The only arguments to Sturgeon's law that I've heard are:
1) that the percentage might be a bit off
2) it's true, but the quantity of the better portions of crud makes up for it still being crud. As in, there's not enough within the top 10% to satisfy me or I can't afford it. So I'll gladly slum and scoop the top 10% of the crud and put up with it being crud because it's less cruddy than the rest, and I need some X amount of stuff, even if half of what I get is crud. This makes perfect sense for food and clothing if you're hungry and poor. For music, the best cure is getting some class and listening to good music in more than one genre.
Of course, there are people who have no taste or standards and who buy whatever they are told to buy by the media or by friends who likewise have no taste or standards. Therefore, some of the crud floats to the top, but it's still crud. There's room for disagreement over particular artists, companies, or products, but some are nearly universally seen as crud but still sell.
Now, I, personally, don't prefer rap as a genre to many other music genres. I'd still rather listen to the top %10 of good rap than the worst music in techno, rock, ska, rockabilly, funk, soul, or blues. While your PP didn't say, I will... I like Public Enemy, and I consider them part of the 10% of good rap groups and most of their music to be within the 10% of good rap music.
I'll put Public Enemy in my playlist along with Elvis, ZZ Top, DJ Keoki, Megadeth, The Chemical Brothers, Stray Cats, Pretenders, The Ramones, James Brown, Garth Brooks, Van Zant, George Clinton, Lynryd Skynyrd, MU330, UB40, John Lee Hooker, The Rolling Stones, 311, AC/DC, Future Sound of London, Aretha Franklin, Allison Krauss, etc. Not because I love rap, but because Public Enemy is good stuff.
By the time you've detected it, it's probably already reported everything. IP, MAC, IP address and HTTP request of last packet to ports 80 (or possibly 443 if it gets its information before the SSL encryption), etc. is not difficult nor time consuming to figure out.
Screw that. They'd honestly be better off in the long run to put that stuff plus some propaganda on the OLPC systems, then give them to the kids. That's the really scary part. If the wrong people handle the OLPC machines between the project sending them and the kids receiving them, it gives every kid in some town in Libya or Pakistan a chance to carry and spread al Qaeda propaganda. At the same time, though, those kids might still be able to get onto the Net and make their own information choices even if the laptops were compromised.
Google's already teamed up with Sprint to offer Google services over Sprint and Nextel networks.
What if Google buys the spectrum (or part of it) and leases it to Sprint on Google's terms, or otherwise uses this partnership to have Google supply the spectrum and Sprint supply the towers?
If Google can put forth the cash for the spectrum, and Sprint can build on top of its network everything needed, you're talking about a powerhouse of wireless Internet and services across it.
Well, with Linux one could mount the internal flash as read-only and let the OS take care of it. With Windows 2k, you might not be able to do anything to stop that. Since it's designed to be for Linux, I'm not sure they'd spend the money to put a BIOS option in for something that the OS could handle.
I'm not sure where it was called an MS killer. It's not even a Dell preloaded Linux killer. It's just another, very cheap and small option for people.
Hell, I don't particularly want to kill MS. I'd just be happy if they stopped spreading FUD, stopped backing frivolous lawsuits against Linux-supporting companies, stopped coercing computer sellers into selling only MS operating systems, and were willing to take the share of the market they could get on product quality and honest marketing. Since they're not willing to do those things, they must realize how little of the market they'd have if they did.
Speaking of homebrew, I was actually thinking of putting a home-brew laptop together. Via EPIA, LCD panel, CompactFlash PATA adapter, compact keyboard, model car or cordless power tool battery, etc. That still works out to be more fun, but this Asus machine works out to be cheaper, sleeker, and probably lighter.
If it takes off well, I'm sure a more powerful battery will be available as an option or in the after-market. I was a bit disappointed at that, too, but there aren't many times I'll need a laptop unplugged for more than an hour, let alone three.
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One can also sell short. That's the practice of selling shares you don't own at certain price when you're sure the stock will fall before the deadline on the sales contract. You then buy the stocks at the lower price once it falls, and sell at the agreed price. Some people do this with borrowed money to back the purchase.
It's possible it could be lucrative, but it's also dangerous. If you short a stock and it rises, you have to buy it at the new, higher price and sell it to your buyer at the agreed price. You're out the difference. If you make this mistake with borrowed money, you now have a portion of your loan with no collateral to back it. The loan or that unsecured portion might be called due immediately, depending on loan terms.
The safer bet is still to buy low and sell high. You can only lose the price of the stock, and the gains are theoretically unlimited. When shorting, you can only gain the difference between your short offer price and the price at which you buy. The theoretical loss is the unlimited part.
Picture this: you short before an expected fall on bad earnings data. You short at $10, and the stock falls to $7. You make $3 per share. The next time you do it, the stock rises to $22 per share because you were dead wrong about the earnings. Just imagine they signed a huge contract the day before, and the buyer paid in full the day of the earnings report (not that such a thing would happen). You're now out $12 per share and you've made an instant $12 per share gain for your buyer. Since you hadn't actually owned the shares before, you haven't collected any dividends, and the entire loss is cash and not partly ownership of the shares.
If you waited for the fall to buy and hold for gains in both cases, you could have bought at $7 and made your money slowly as the stock recovered in the first place. In the second, you could have bought at $10.50, $11, or $12 on the way up, and sold at anywhere from $12 to $22 after additional rises. You could have made up to $11.50 per share yourself, which is more than you could ever theoretically have made on shorting the $10 stock. You could only be out a maximum of $10 even if the company ceased operations and also had no salable assets at the end of the trading day.
The advantage of shorting is that if you really are sure the stock will tank, you can make the difference with no investment of your own funds. The disadvantages can be devastating if you're wrong.
Actually, I'll have to disagree. The Postal Service has competition from UPS, FedEx, DHL, the Internet, private couriers, dial-in message retrieval systems (being killed by the Net), and fax machines. They don't even handle freight shipments, for which we have road, rail, planes, boats, and combinations thereof. There certainly are private roads in this country, although they are mostly short and local. The railroads were always owned, and even Amtrak, which is highly subsidized, runs on private tracks many places.
AT&T should have been split in three. AT&T Local, Bell Long Distance, and Bell (or AT&T) hardware, which would make switches, billing systems, and phone sets. One huge local provider, one huge long distance provider, and one hardware maker. The Labs probably should have gone with the hardware people.
Then, anyone who want to play long distance provider should have been able to negotiate with the Local company on a level playing field, and should have been able to offer Long Distance rates at their cost + the interconnect with the local + markup.
Anyone who wanted to be a local provider in an area should have had full rights to buy or lease any wire AT&T Local wanted to part with (at a profit to AT&T Local), and also have full rights to pay the locality the same rates for the same right-of-way to lay cable next to AT&T's cables.
Anyone who could make inter-operating equipment should have been able to make and sell equipment to AT&T Local, to Bell Long Distance, or to businesses and consumers.
This would have allowed for the company to have been split up, for the money shifting to be clearer, for competition to have been increased, and for the large network effects to still have been possible for savings and innovations. Unix might have become a single-seller OS from the hardware people this way, but think of the data systems we could have had if there was fully-funded Bell Labs at a hardware company rather than AT&T Long Distance keeping it and screwing it.
As it was, we got Bell Labs pillaged for people and cash by the baby Bells, Unix and a bunch of other innovations turned from liberally licensed to the Novell/SCO/Santa Cruz/BayStar/Open Group/Microsoft/Berkeley/DEC Unix/OSF1/SunOS/Solaris mess, the RBOCs mostly merged together (Verizon and AT&T account for all of them now, right?) anyway, now with long distance anyway, etc.
Cell phones, if the norm was one big local company, would likely have been viewed as another way to get local service. You'd have your land line or your cell phone, and either one ties into a grid and you pay the going LD rate for your LD carrier. You could roam and still have local access to your home local area, and pay long distance per minute (or flat-rate if your LD carrier has that available). Roaming could have been negotiated among locals or even mandated by the government. It could have been a roam-for-roam agreement. Maybe you'd end up paying LD to call your home area while roaming, but just local service to call the community you're currently calling from. That'd be a fair trade when you're on the road for business and calling your local contacts a lot.
Data-only networks should get the same breaks the Bell companies have always had to lay cables and secure rights-of-way. Someone would take FTTH or at least Fiber to the Block seriously if they didn't have to negotiate rights-of-way all over again.
Municipalities should be able to offer phone and data service, just like many offer water, gas, and electric. That shouldn't exclude private companies from offering those services as well.
Springfield, Illinois, where I lived for a number of years, has its own city-owned power plant (sorry, it's not nuclear and not owned by Montgomery Burns). They sell excess power to other, smaller towns around the city. The proceeds from that go to keep prices down and offset what would require tax revenues for city residents. If the city ran fiber to every block and 10Mbit or 100Mbit Etherne
I know some people who are legitimately "big-boned".
A girl I knew in junior high and high school had about 20 inch waist, but wore a size 10 jeans and women's large or extra large shirts. Her pants were baggy at the waist, but just barely fit over her hips. Her shirts hung, but anything smaller wouldn't fit over her very broad shoulders. She's never been fat or flabby.
I have a friend who has to do pull-ups with his hands about 2 or 3 inches apart at the most, because any farther apart and his shoulder blades touch. His chest after being in Kuwait and Iraq in the desert heat wearing boy armor for months was still over 50 inches. Even when he's got nearly an fat on him, the guy's much bigger around than most people his height. He does sometimes carry some extra weight, but he's big even when he doesn't.
While it can be used as an excuse by the overweight, there really does appear to b a difference between slightly built people and people with larger frames. Keeping the muscles toned and the fat down to a healthy level is what matters. Height/weight guides and the body mass index are not a true replacement for body fat percentage. They are much easier to get data to compare against, and they work pretty well for most people, which is why they are so popular. The BMI at least gives someone an idea of the range they should be close to, even if they might end up being a little above or below that and be perfectly healthy.
The really interesting thing here is that TSP with one photon per route really would be O(n!). The article says they need a higher power on the reference light to make detection feasible, and it's the power of the reference light which dominates photon input concerns. Besides, cutting all that fiber and making all those junctions isn't exactly fast or general-purpose.
... so 38,014,093,877,760,000 per core on a 64-core box. That's 988,366,440,821,760,000 instructions run per core according to the earlier estimate, and doubling gets us 1,976,732,881,643,520,000. At 2GHz, we're looking at around 988,366,441 seconds on the multi-core part of the previous example. That's a bit over 31 years. The rest of this example is left as an exercise for the reader.
So this means we could really do the same thing with n! threads or processes each running on a core and a min() function just after almost as fast. Of course, 100! is still really big. Heck, 10! is over 3.6 million.
With a 64 core box, you're looking at 57,600 routes per core to figure for 10 cities. If you figure 10 register sets, a jump to the routine, 5 swaps, 9 adds, and one return, you're looking at 26 cycles plus any additional overhead like memory waits. 26 * 57,600 = 1,474,200. So let's assume a bunch of overhead, and call it 2.9 million instructions (about double). Then, there's finding the min of 3,628,800 results. That'd be, in a very naive implementation, 3,628,799 comparisons. Let's double that, so 7.2 million. Let's add these, for 2.9 million + 7.2 million (because the comparisons are being done very naively on a single processor after the route lengths have been done on the separate cores). 2.9 + 7.2 is about 10.1 million (I've rounded a few times, and thrown in some wild estimates, so forget about precision). How long does it take to burn through 10.1 million cycles? Well, on a machine that does one instruction per clock and has a conservative 2Ghz clock on every core, not very long at all. However, even though we're not too many years from having 64 cores in a typical mid-range rack-mount server, I can think of much better uses for that kind of power.
2,432,902,008,176,640,000 is 20!
The heuristic approaches to find good approximations of the NP Complete problems are usually very much good enough. Also, since it's possible to check whether or not a given solution to an NP Complete problem is the ideal solution in polynomial time, a few iterations of a good heuristic or two with a double-check at the end is probably still the best way to go even for finding the very best path until quantum systems are feasible for this type of application.
This photon interference idea using variable-length optical fibers is a neat trick, but unfortunately that's all it's likely to ever be.
There's a certification mark that confirms something is an Audio CD. No silver disk that's not Red Book standard can legally carry that certification mark. The music and tech companies behind the Red Book format themselves made it that way, so that incompatible disks from other parties could not be labeled as compatible. Now guess who wants to sell you things contrary to the agreements they signed on that format?
Yeah, about 65% of that being Blu0Ray, and 35% HD-DVD. I can't seem to find the regular DVD numbers.
By comparison, The Matrix sold 750,000 DVD copies in the same timeframe. So Blu-Ray and HD-DVD combined still have a way to go I think. Neither format is the improvement over DVD that DVD was over VHS, so slower uptake I think should be expected.
Sure, higher def audio and video makes a big difference, but with DVD vs. VHS there was random/sequential, digital/analog, optical/magnetic, thin and flat/bulky, rigid spinning/tugged along on a spool.
I think all signs point to Blu-Ray ramping up nicely, but still being in the ramp-up stage. With Japanese porn and lots of American mainstream studios pushing Blu-Ray, it will probably beat HD-DVD to the video crown. I just don't think we're at the end of the ramp-up yet.
Speaking of FreeBSD and MySQL, does FreeBSD's threading still kill MySQL performance? I know there's been some work on the whole issue, but I haven't followed all of it.
tail -f would only need to seek to the end of the file periodically and see if there's anything to read. In fact, some implementations close the file, re-open it, then seek to the end of the file. That allows other programs to actually write to the file that's being tailed even if there's an implicit lock (like on Windows).
GNU tail does some nice things like detecting if the inode has changed and opening the new file in place of the old one. That helps with some things like log rotation during the tail. I also saw just now some mtime, device, mode, and filesize checks, but nothing to do with atime.
I think the idea was that he kept the pics after the new girlfriend became the new girlfriend. That upsets some people.
Some will think it's just nice to have nudie pics, even if they are of an ex. If you're sure your SO isn't looking at them longingly and wishing to have the ex instead of you, it might be alright that the pics stay around.
I'm surprised that he'd want to confront her if they both think it's okay for him to have them and look at them, though. She is probably just wondering if she measures up, wondering why he likes seeing the naked body of his ex when he has the new girlfriend, etc. Even if she's not insecure and confrontational about it, those are valid reasons for her to be curious.
On the very bright side, it may mean his new girlfriend is thinking about being into guys and girls and might be open for a threesome. That's something he might not want to screw up by bitching about her attractions.
If it's a recursive ls (ls -R) and there are a lot of directories, it might make a difference. There's still reason to suspect caching made the difference, though.
A handful of early adopters is not a sizable market. You're just subsidizing manufacturing line refreshes and ramp-up that will give the rest of us the same stuff for half as much in two years or so. Thanks for that, BTW.
Actually, I misread the article. It's not one photon. It isn't necessarily n**n, either. It's proportional to n**n. To be precise, it looks like 5/64 * n**n.
That's still a lot, but it's far fewer than n**n.
Still, it does seem that it limits it to the "neat trick" category.
Good thing they were talking about a single photon being split and traveling all possible paths simultaneously, and measuring the interference, then.
Still, they say that for larger problem sets the SNR makes detection and filtering too difficult. Larger problem sets are precisely where one worries the most about computational complexity, of course. So it's still, at least for now, just a neat trick.
Of course it's doctored. Everyone knows that ceremony takes place at dawn. Sheesh. ;-)
This is probably the most intelligent discussion of how the Internet and music distribution intertwine that I've seen as text. Thanks for putting this on Slashdot. Now, if we could just get this in front of regular people.
It's Mandriva 2006, which would normally be installed with 5 as the default runlevel. It's at runlevel 3 on boot because I often use it remotely or from the CLI and only start up X as needed. My wife was bored one day at the office, so it now has TuxRacer on it, and she's learned how to manually start X.org in order to play.
Exactly. If Google buys (leases, really) the spectrum, and Sprint does the build-out (for which they already have towers and network capacity, and would just need some upgrades and new transceivers on the towers) then Google is left holding nothing. Nothing up on the towers to take back down, nothing corroding and getting blown down, nothing to depreciate, and nothing to sell as scrap if the spectrum goes away.
In the meantime, Google services Sprint's customers with Google content and Google ads, and charges out the ass for ads on all of that. Sprint offers the best bandwidth for non-line-of-sight there is in the realm of internet access, and gets to piggyback on Google's bandwidth lease at dirt cheap rates.
That's all assuming Google wouldn't win the bid again when the spectrum comes up for its next auction.
Let me tell you a little true story.
This is the year of the Windows, Mac, and Linux desktops running side by side on a single geek's desk, while his mom, sister, brother-in-law, sister-in-law, and other brother-in-law and half his friends run only Windows. His grandmother and some of his aunts and uncles don't touch a computer, ever, if they can help it. His dad runs Unreal Tournament, Doom, and sometimes Axis and Allies on Windows 98 hoping he won't cause a massive crash. His wife runs Linux well enough to log in, type startx, play tuxracer, shutdown X, and log out.
Hey, it's slow, but it's progress.
FYI, Sturgeon's Law is, basically, "90% of everything is crud".
By saying that rap abides by Sturgeon's Law, that implies that 90% of rap is crud, while 10% is good or at least worthwhile.
It's also the same for every other genre of music, for video games (or software in general), for cars, for restaurants, for books, or for shoes. 90% of all of it is crud, and only 10% or so is worth even considering.
The only arguments to Sturgeon's law that I've heard are:
1) that the percentage might be a bit off
2) it's true, but the quantity of the better portions of crud makes up for it still being crud. As in, there's not enough within the top 10% to satisfy me or I can't afford it. So I'll gladly slum and scoop the top 10% of the crud and put up with it being crud because it's less cruddy than the rest, and I need some X amount of stuff, even if half of what I get is crud. This makes perfect sense for food and clothing if you're hungry and poor. For music, the best cure is getting some class and listening to good music in more than one genre.
Of course, there are people who have no taste or standards and who buy whatever they are told to buy by the media or by friends who likewise have no taste or standards. Therefore, some of the crud floats to the top, but it's still crud. There's room for disagreement over particular artists, companies, or products, but some are nearly universally seen as crud but still sell.
Now, I, personally, don't prefer rap as a genre to many other music genres. I'd still rather listen to the top %10 of good rap than the worst music in techno, rock, ska, rockabilly, funk, soul, or blues. While your PP didn't say, I will... I like Public Enemy, and I consider them part of the 10% of good rap groups and most of their music to be within the 10% of good rap music.
I'll put Public Enemy in my playlist along with Elvis, ZZ Top, DJ Keoki, Megadeth, The Chemical Brothers, Stray Cats, Pretenders, The Ramones, James Brown, Garth Brooks, Van Zant, George Clinton, Lynryd Skynyrd, MU330, UB40, John Lee Hooker, The Rolling Stones, 311, AC/DC, Future Sound of London, Aretha Franklin, Allison Krauss, etc. Not because I love rap, but because Public Enemy is good stuff.
By the time you've detected it, it's probably already reported everything. IP, MAC, IP address and HTTP request of last packet to ports 80 (or possibly 443 if it gets its information before the SSL encryption), etc. is not difficult nor time consuming to figure out.
Screw that. They'd honestly be better off in the long run to put that stuff plus some propaganda on the OLPC systems, then give them to the kids. That's the really scary part. If the wrong people handle the OLPC machines between the project sending them and the kids receiving them, it gives every kid in some town in Libya or Pakistan a chance to carry and spread al Qaeda propaganda. At the same time, though, those kids might still be able to get onto the Net and make their own information choices even if the laptops were compromised.
Google's already teamed up with Sprint to offer Google services over Sprint and Nextel networks.
What if Google buys the spectrum (or part of it) and leases it to Sprint on Google's terms, or otherwise uses this partnership to have Google supply the spectrum and Sprint supply the towers?
If Google can put forth the cash for the spectrum, and Sprint can build on top of its network everything needed, you're talking about a powerhouse of wireless Internet and services across it.
Well, with Linux one could mount the internal flash as read-only and let the OS take care of it. With Windows 2k, you might not be able to do anything to stop that. Since it's designed to be for Linux, I'm not sure they'd spend the money to put a BIOS option in for something that the OS could handle.
I'm not sure where it was called an MS killer. It's not even a Dell preloaded Linux killer. It's just another, very cheap and small option for people.
Hell, I don't particularly want to kill MS. I'd just be happy if they stopped spreading FUD, stopped backing frivolous lawsuits against Linux-supporting companies, stopped coercing computer sellers into selling only MS operating systems, and were willing to take the share of the market they could get on product quality and honest marketing. Since they're not willing to do those things, they must realize how little of the market they'd have if they did.
Speaking of homebrew, I was actually thinking of putting a home-brew laptop together. Via EPIA, LCD panel, CompactFlash PATA adapter, compact keyboard, model car or cordless power tool battery, etc. That still works out to be more fun, but this Asus machine works out to be cheaper, sleeker, and probably lighter.
If it takes off well, I'm sure a more powerful battery will be available as an option or in the after-market. I was a bit disappointed at that, too, but there aren't many times I'll need a laptop unplugged for more than an hour, let alone three.