"When you send me a one-byte copy of, say, The Matrix, you also have to tell me how many times it was compressed so I know how many times to run the decompressor!"
Not true! You don't need an extra byte for the number of times the compression has been run, as long as you compress files that are no larger than a certain size.
If each pass reduces the size by two orders of magnitude, then 256 compressions will compress down by a factor of (on average) 10^512 = one hundred million billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion
billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion
billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion
billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion
billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion
billion billion billion billion billion billion times. That's enough to compress a 1024 x 768 movie (at 50 fps and 24 bit colour) into a single byte, as long as the movie runs for less than fifty five billion eight hundred million billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion
billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion
billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion
billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion
billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion
billion billion billion billion times the current age of the UNIVERSE.
Therefore, I should easily be able to compress The Matrix into a single byte with 256 passes.
I don't need to encode the number of compressions, every decompression consists of decompressing 256 times.
This is not a walk in the park, it is space exploration, and attention DOES need to be paid to detail. or am I wrong?
You're wrong, this isn't Space Exploration. We've already been to NEO thousands of times, it's the first place we've been. The ISS is like camping in the backyard as compared to hiking in the woods. Instead of exploring space, we're putting more and more people and expensive hardware into the backyard.
I think you should "seed" the email system with emails with a nghtyboy.exe attachment. When it's run, nghtybox.exe can assume that the person sitting in front of the screen is the kind of person who mindlessly runs attachments. You could write the program to:
send an identifying message to a central server
run a tutorial on why you shouldn't run attachments, who seds them, a little history, etc.
Which attachments are relatively safe (.jpg,.gif etc)
Anything else (like change their startup screen to say "Remember, only YOU can prevent Outlook Worms")
Rule: Fast CPUs make life good
on
CPU Wars
·
· Score: 1
A couple of things a fast CPU can be good for:
Real-time rendering of fractal worlds
Compiling
Fast simulations
Resurrecting interpreted languages (like Java)
Emulators! Mame! X64!
Excellent screen savers
Flash
Discreet simulation
Particle systems
Although, you're right, there are a lot of applications out there nowadays that don't run any faster with a faster processor. Witness all the absoute crap that Intel is pushing in it's ads about increasing Internet speeds. However, just because there are many programs that don't improve their performance if you buy a high-end graphics card, high speed ethernet card, or wireless networking card, but that doesn't mean that these cards aren't cool or interesting. I bet there are many more non-game programs that perform better with double the CPU speed than there are that perform better with double the polygon rate.
So.. short version: Leave Santa's factory alone! I want neat toys, and 2 GHz processors are definitely on the list!
Metaphors abound on this one, and I think this has been said before, but...
I can legally buy a gun, I can legally walk in a store, but if I use that gun to rob that store it is illegal...
Now it seems that telling someone that guns can be used to kill people is illegal.
Coincidentally, right now I'm watching a TV programme with an undercover reporter showing how you can fake your own death in Haiti to claim life insurance. Is he now doing something illegal? Will the insurance companies be sending a cease and desist letter?
Honestly, if a plague which infected only lawyers was loosed upon the world, I'd party all night.
If there was a tracking device installed subcutaneously on every single American citizen in the country, and our borders were closed, THEN would you people feel safe?
If a politician ran with this policy, their popularity would go up.
You just can't tell anymore which way a case is going to be decided, based solely on the facts and a moral sense of right and wrong.
I propose replacing all courts with a big ceremonial Tossing of the Coin. Bring a case before the courts, hand over a big cheque ($100,000 for Supremes, less for smaller courts), the Judge orders who shall be heads and who shall be tails, and the court-appointed Coin Flipper performs the toss. "Heads! The case is decided in the affirmative!"
Doomed.
USA's P.R. and Marketing Departments
on
DMCA 2, Freedom 0
·
· Score: 1
I find it hard to believe that in America, the land of the "free",...[snip]
"Land of the Free"(tm) and "Home of the Brave"(tm) are clever marketing slogans used by the USA's Public Relations Department to create one extra happy-face in each city, allowing them to reduce the actual quality of life.
Oh, and I can't believe that anyone (except the corporations) are happy about paid corporate lobbyists. How come it works? Aren't you living in a Democracy? Clearly not.
Environmentally friendly? CHRIST NO! Why bother, if you launch it from the moon? The moon (and the rest of space for that matter) is a dead pile of ashes, perfect playground for boys and the big toys. Space is the place where maniacs with giant guns and bombs can do some good!
You shouldn't report news on slashdot because 1) that's not the purpose and 2) you often get it wrong and spread misinformation.
On the other hand, (1a) Slashdot has some excellent servers that don't seem to go down when the news sites go down, and (1b) Slashdot is a conversation, started by the editors, on whatever Nerds [like moi] are interested in [ie. "News for Nerds"]. Judging solely on the number of comments on the various New York stories, Nerds are Interested.
As for (2), yes, we all know slashdot spreads rumors. We are also smart enough to know the reports are unsubstantiated. But most comments (well, most of them above -1 anyway) don't report rumours as information, they just state "X says Y, and based on the evidence I think Z" which makes sense for me.
As for me - as soon as I heard something was going on, I leapt straight for slashdot and I'm sure a lot of other people did the same.
I remember a guy I used to work with. I left the company partially due to his personality.
He was the picture postcard for onanism [look it up], and would deliberately annoy people in order to get attention. Positive attention, negative attention, outright hatred and abuse, he didn't care, as long as someone acknowledged his presence.
I think that's the kind of person we're dealing with here.
The storm's been running for a couple of months now, but it's still going to be a few more months before the orbit has been stabilised through aerobraking. Think february next year.
Took me a while to work out why they needed another mars probe orbiting the planet when they've still got a perfectly good probe doing a two metre resolution map of the entire surface. The answer is twofold:
Comms satellite
It acts as a relay between the surface and the Earth, so any new probes (like the twin rovers due to take off next year) wont have to carry big dishes and radios.
To sumarise. "IBM legally f*ks the system for the benefit of shareholders. If you try to stop them, we'll become a third world country." Am I right so far? Then you give us this gem, your only assertion of fact to support your flimsy argument:
And finally, for those who think that patents are evil or somehow inappropriate for software, processes, and "obvious" inventions,[hey! he's talking about me!] consider this. There is a 100% direct correlation to a country's GDP, the strength of its intellectual property protections, and the number of patents filed by its citizens.
All dogs have four legs. My cat has four legs, therefore my cat is a dog.
There is a 100% direct correlation between a country's GDP, the number of people who own TVs, and the number of TV shows produced, therefore TV increases your GDP?
There is a 100% inverse correlation between a country's GDP, and the percentage of the population who sleep in mud huts, therefore destroy all mud huts!
People strive
to achieve a coherent interpretation of the events that surround
them. The organisation of events by schemas of cause-effect relations serves to achieve this goal.
But whereas
with a normative treatment of conditional probability the data D and
an event X can be equally informative, psychologically, causal data
tends to have a far greater impact than other data of equal
informativeness. So much so, that in the presence of data that evokes
a causal schema, incidental data which does not fit that schema is
given little or no consideration.
This language is obviously not written in english, but in lawyer-speak or precedent-speak. Precedent-speak is where you use a very small number of words which have been carfully tested by case law to have a single well-defined meaning (IANALBIWPMAL*).
What we really need is something that can take this language and render it into much more readable pseudocode.
A much easier task might be to take a Patent Definition Language input and output a legally binding patent! I better go patent this idea straight away...
* I am not a lwayer, but I watched Perry Mason a lot.
You are either a fool or a troll. I'm torn between modding you down or replying.
This one simple, OBVIOUS rule would strike down just about every software patent in existence
Yes, maybe it should, but it DOESN'T. You would be right, and this would indeed be a pointless discussion if we lived in a world where 99% of patents were deemed unenforcable, but that's some other reality.
In this reality, this patent is (at a guess) 80% likely to generate licensing revenue for IBM. Any company that makes a HTML template program, and fears IBM enough to worry that they might enforce this patent WILL pay a licensing fee. IBM is duty bound to it's shareholders to attempt to (a) file this patent and (b) make revenue from this patent.
Yes, it's evil. No, there are no answers. Yes, let's keep talking about it.
Didn't you ever play games where the keyboard controls where something like
A=up
Z=up
<=left
>=right
It's easy to play games with your hands that far apart. It's sometimes a lot more comfortable than arrow keys! (How do you hover a fingertip over each of those keys at the same time? Don't tell me to use my middle finger for the up and down button, that's just not fast enough. Thumb over the down button works, but gets painful after the first few hours)
Seriously, this controller looks very sweet. Hope it's not a joke.
Slashdot Mirror
burnt hands
bad odor
ciruits that just didn't etch correctly.
You forgot the endless thrills of:
Don't do laundry plus 3 T-shirts = three more days before I have to go clothes shopping again.
Aha! Now I get it, it's a shell script to run gzip multiple times! Too bad I got prior art:
#!/bin/bash /tmp/$$ /tmp/$$ > $1
#supercompress filename number_of_iterations
x=$2
while (($x > 0)); do
gzip -c $1 >
gzip -c
let x=$x-1
done
Yay! All your codecs are belong to us!
Not true! You don't need an extra byte for the number of times the compression has been run, as long as you compress files that are no larger than a certain size.
If each pass reduces the size by two orders of magnitude, then 256 compressions will compress down by a factor of (on average) 10^512 = one hundred million billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion times. That's enough to compress a 1024 x 768 movie (at 50 fps and 24 bit colour) into a single byte, as long as the movie runs for less than fifty five billion eight hundred million billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion times the current age of the UNIVERSE.
Therefore, I should easily be able to compress The Matrix into a single byte with 256 passes.
I don't need to encode the number of compressions, every decompression consists of decompressing 256 times.
- Real-time rendering of fractal worlds
- Compiling
- Fast simulations
- Resurrecting interpreted languages (like Java)
- Emulators! Mame! X64!
- Excellent screen savers
- Flash
- Discreet simulation
- Particle systems
Although, you're right, there are a lot of applications out there nowadays that don't run any faster with a faster processor. Witness all the absoute crap that Intel is pushing in it's ads about increasing Internet speeds. However, just because there are many programs that don't improve their performance if you buy a high-end graphics card, high speed ethernet card, or wireless networking card, but that doesn't mean that these cards aren't cool or interesting. I bet there are many more non-game programs that perform better with double the CPU speed than there are that perform better with double the polygon rate.So.. short version: Leave Santa's factory alone! I want neat toys, and 2 GHz processors are definitely on the list!
Coincidentally, right now I'm watching a TV programme with an undercover reporter showing how you can fake your own death in Haiti to claim life insurance. Is he now doing something illegal? Will the insurance companies be sending a cease and desist letter?
Honestly, if a plague which infected only lawyers was loosed upon the world, I'd party all night.
If a politician ran with this policy, their popularity would go up.
I propose replacing all courts with a big ceremonial Tossing of the Coin. Bring a case before the courts, hand over a big cheque ($100,000 for Supremes, less for smaller courts), the Judge orders who shall be heads and who shall be tails, and the court-appointed Coin Flipper performs the toss. "Heads! The case is decided in the affirmative!"
Doomed.
Oh, and I can't believe that anyone (except the corporations) are happy about paid corporate lobbyists. How come it works? Aren't you living in a Democracy? Clearly not.
% cat > /var/www/html/robots.txt /
User-agent: *
Disallow:
^D
%
% cd /var/www /
% cat > robots.txt
User-agent: *
Disallow:
^D
%
Economically viable? Hard to say. Necessary? Yes, eventually. Legal? No, but then again, treaties with USA aren't worth the paper they're written on.
Environmentally friendly? CHRIST NO! Why bother, if you launch it from the moon? The moon (and the rest of space for that matter) is a dead pile of ashes, perfect playground for boys and the big toys. Space is the place where maniacs with giant guns and bombs can do some good!
On the other hand, (1a) Slashdot has some excellent servers that don't seem to go down when the news sites go down, and (1b) Slashdot is a conversation, started by the editors, on whatever Nerds [like moi] are interested in [ie. "News for Nerds"]. Judging solely on the number of comments on the various New York stories, Nerds are Interested.
As for (2), yes, we all know slashdot spreads rumors. We are also smart enough to know the reports are unsubstantiated. But most comments (well, most of them above -1 anyway) don't report rumours as information, they just state "X says Y, and based on the evidence I think Z" which makes sense for me.
As for me - as soon as I heard something was going on, I leapt straight for slashdot and I'm sure a lot of other people did the same.
He was the picture postcard for onanism [look it up], and would deliberately annoy people in order to get attention. Positive attention, negative attention, outright hatred and abuse, he didn't care, as long as someone acknowledged his presence.
I think that's the kind of person we're dealing with here.
The storm's been running for a couple of months now, but it's still going to be a few more months before the orbit has been stabilised through aerobraking. Think february next year.
class Circle extends Ellipse {
...
}
High Res Spectrometers
This baby has two spectrometers, one in infrared for working out the mineral composition of the surface to a resolution of 100 metres, and one in gamma rays, for working out how much hydrogen there is near the surface, and consequently how much rocket fuel they can make in different places if/when they land.
Comms satellite It acts as a relay between the surface and the Earth, so any new probes (like the twin rovers due to take off next year) wont have to carry big dishes and radios.
All this and more on the website.
And finally, for those who think that patents are evil or somehow inappropriate for software, processes, and "obvious" inventions,[hey! he's talking about me!] consider this. There is a 100% direct correlation to a country's GDP, the strength of its intellectual property protections, and the number of patents filed by its citizens.
All dogs have four legs. My cat has four legs, therefore my cat is a dog.
There is a 100% direct correlation between a country's GDP, the number of people who own TVs, and the number of TV shows produced, therefore TV increases your GDP?
There is a 100% inverse correlation between a country's GDP, and the percentage of the population who sleep in mud huts, therefore destroy all mud huts!
A quote from an article on causal reasoning:
What we really need is something that can take this language and render it into much more readable pseudocode.
A much easier task might be to take a Patent Definition Language input and output a legally binding patent! I better go patent this idea straight away...
* I am not a lwayer, but I watched Perry Mason a lot.
This one simple, OBVIOUS rule would strike down just about every software patent in existence
Yes, maybe it should, but it DOESN'T. You would be right, and this would indeed be a pointless discussion if we lived in a world where 99% of patents were deemed unenforcable, but that's some other reality.
In this reality, this patent is (at a guess) 80% likely to generate licensing revenue for IBM. Any company that makes a HTML template program, and fears IBM enough to worry that they might enforce this patent WILL pay a licensing fee. IBM is duty bound to it's shareholders to attempt to (a) file this patent and (b) make revenue from this patent.
Yes, it's evil. No, there are no answers. Yes, let's keep talking about it.
A=up
Z=up
<=left
>=right
It's easy to play games with your hands that far apart. It's sometimes a lot more comfortable than arrow keys! (How do you hover a fingertip over each of those keys at the same time? Don't tell me to use my middle finger for the up and down button, that's just not fast enough. Thumb over the down button works, but gets painful after the first few hours)
Seriously, this controller looks very sweet. Hope it's not a joke.