Apple's stock is best to day-trade, because it rides 10% swings constantly.
As someone who has actually invested in Apple for a few years, this didn't sound right to me. So I checked. The last time AAPL had a daily change larger than 10% was on 11/24/2008, when it jumped 12.55% from 82.23 to 92.55.
It's all really very simple. The concept of "you" or "me" is just that - an abstract concept. This concept only makes sense when certain conditions hold.
After the betrayal that was "Lost", I'm no longer watching anything by J. J. Abrams. Apparently the latest model of attracting viewers is to keep throwing mysteries and questions on them, without any plan to ever answer them. This is not something I am interested in.
I recently gave up trying to explain to some mentally challenged person here on Slashdot the very simple concept of property ownership and how once somebody sells you something they literally have no rights over it. Morally, ethically, etc... no rights.
I don't think it's as clear cut as that. If I sell you a painting I made, would you not agree that I still have the right to say that I painted it? Would you say that you have the right to erase my signature, draw your own and tell everyone you painted it?
Assume that, to begin with, the car is moving at wind speed. The wheels are spinning (because the car is moving) and you can use that energy (i.e. brake the car) to push the propeller
No, you can't use that energy to move forward. The experiment boils down to two mediums moving relative to each other (we can choose to tie the coordinate system to the ground, to the wind, or at any constant speed). If you are stationary relative to one of the mediums, you can only use the other medium to change your velocity. You can only use it to change your velocity in the direction of the movement of that medium.
Imagine two opposing winds with between them, moving at the speed of wind1 (in its direction). Can you use wind2 to propel yourself in the direction of wind2?
As the grand-grand-parent says, however, it is very much possible to achieve the feat in the article by storing energy during the acceleration phase (you would end up accelerating slower than you would otherwise) and then once you reach wind speed, use that energy to move faster. Once that energy runs out, however, you will slow down to wind speed.
The string "SC2" is forever and ever reserved as an identifier for the best quest ever made, and a definite contender for the best game ever -- Star Control 2.
I'm probably too late to get modded up, but since none of the existing responses gave the exactly correct explanation, I'll have to post rather than moderated.
sqrt(1) is 1. It's not -1. By definition.
A list of transformations of an equality like the one given in the grandparent's "proof" is shorthand for a list of "implies" statements. For example, a proof like this:
2x-4=0 2x=4 x=2
is actually shorthand for:
A. 2x-4=0 (assumption). B. 2x-4=0 implies 2x=4 (by rules of arithmetic). C. 2x=4 implies x=2 (by rules of arithmetic). D. 2x-4=0 implies x=2 (from B and C, as implication is transitive). E. x=2 (from A and D, by Modus Ponens).
When you rewrite the shorthand proof in the grandparent post in full form, the mistake becomes (more) obvious: a^2=b^2 does not imply that a=b. But this has nothing to do with the sqrt function, it is because of the square function; because it is not an injective (one-to-one) function.
To illustrate by taking it to an extreme - instead of f(x)=x^2, let's take a different non-injective function: f(x)=0. Would you have any trouble realizing that f(a)=f(b) does not imply a=b?
As an amusing curiosity, one way to define |x| (the absolute value of x) is sqrt(x^2). |x|, as you may guess, is also a non-injective function.
An algorithm that runs in n*log(n) is slower than n.
Also, big-O is the wrong thing to use here - you want little-o (or little-omega). An algorithm being O(f(n)) only means that the algorithm runs in (asymptotically) less than or same number of of steps as f(n). An algorithm that runs in k*log(n)+p steps is in O(n^2) and in O(n) and in O(log(n)). To show that an algorithm A (that runs in f(n) steps) is faster than algorithm B (that runs in g(n) steps) you need to show that g(n) is in w(f(n)) ('w' is little-omega), or conversely that f(n) is in o(g(n)) ('o' is little-o).
I hate the use of the equals sign with the asymptotical growth notations, because it is extremely confusing to people who forget that O(f(n)) is a set, as are o(f(n)), w(f(n) and Omega(f(n)). If you use '=', you get confusing things like n=O(n^2) and n^2=O(n^2), so one might deduce that n=n^2. So let's everyone agree to use \in instead of '=' from now on. OK?
As an avid EVE player and an experienced software developer, I can confidently tell you that from the perspective of software design and development EVE is a pile of steaming crap. Every new release breaks existing features and known bugs last for years. Much of the code, the developers themselves have admitted, can't be touched anymore because nobody understands how it works. Instead of fixing bugs, they write new features which are released unfinished and then promptly forgotten when the next expansion is due.
What keeps EVE afloat and myself playing the game is that the concept itself is amazing. The day I managed to load Elite on my Sinclair, I knew that the the same game, with added massively multiplayer gameplay over the network would be awesome.
Who in their right mind would compare codec quality by encoding screenshots in a lossy image format??? To add insult to injury, the GIF image files in the article have a.jpg extension.
This article, and the person who wrote it, are worse than useless.
Most of the examples where he tried to interact with the "game" and failed were simply not written to respond to iPad's touch events. It's pretty easy to add touch listeners, but they just haven't.
Uhh, except that Apple are at the forefront of developing those same new web technologies you're talking about. They are among the first to implement them in their web browser(s). You've just explained exactly why it's unlikely that Apple's reasons are what you say they are.
They would do better to remove the CAPS LOCK key, which is more bulky and - as far as I know - useful only to morons who don't know how to keep from SHOUTING on the internet.
I can't believe this is being repeated on slashdot of all places. Does nobody capitalize their constants anymore??
P.S. The otherwise lovely new Apple USB keyboard drives me insane when I use it to write code because of this feature (which I can't find how to disable).
"What about the environmental impact of the extra time required to write the same functionality in C++?"
Should be about equal to the environment impact of maintaining the PHP language itself; in fact, it is likely to be less than that, since there would be no need to maintain the actual interpreter, but only duplicate some functionality. This is really a one-off, and the libraries could be reused by thousands of enterprises.
You're making a strange argument. Why does maintaining the C++ language have less of an environmental impact than that of maintaining the PHP language?
Bugs and security breaches do not cause any more CO2 emission than bug-free code, so I do not really see your point in bringing them up.
So having a person wake up and drive to work to fix something in the middle of the night doesn't cause any pollution? And that's just a very minor issue (and minor impact). Serious bugs and security breaches can create a lot of extra work with a lot of environmental impact.
P.S. Due to the laws of thermodynamics, work is always (thermal) pollution:-)
That's a ridiculous way to analyze it. What about the environmental impact of the extra time required to write the same functionality in C++? What about the impact of whole classes of C++ bugs that don't exist in C++ (and, perhaps, vice versa) with the downtime or security breaches resulting from them? Or a hundred other ways in which writing all that software in C++ would be different of which I can't think at the moment?
While by no means a short game, I'd hardly call World of Goo lengthy. I recall spending months on Lemmings, an oldie in the same genre, with sometimes weeks on certain difficult levels. World of Goo took me a whole of a few days to finish. I'm looking forward to harder fan-made levels.
My GWT maps are just as smooth as Google Maps, and the library supports the WMS tiling protocol, which I'm guessing is what OpenStreeMap uses. I'll have to investigate and talk to the OpenStreetMap guys to maybe use my client.
I am a UI designer by trade, and many is the time I have thought about wading in to a F/LOSS project in order to improve the usability of the interface (last one I considered was IPCop).
Perhaps you should actually try before giving up. I'm sure there are many projects out there who would love to have a good UI designer on board. Heck, if you want to help me with my Jin client for chess servers, I would love every bit of what you could offer.
I know you were joking, but as an administrator on a chess server, I can tell you that people get pretty pissed off when lagging half a second. It's acceptable for playing long games, but most over-the-net chess games are 1 to 5 minutes per player per game. Yes, it's a whole different game that just shares moving rules with "chess".
He reasons that if reality was to do something that information processing cannot, then it cannot be virtual.
All it would mean is that the outside ("real") reality has processing capabilities qualitatively different (and superiour to) from the ones our reality, and are thus able to simulate it.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple's stock is best to day-trade, because it rides 10% swings constantly.
As someone who has actually invested in Apple for a few years, this didn't sound right to me. So I checked. The last time AAPL had a daily change larger than 10% was on 11/24/2008, when it jumped 12.55% from 82.23 to 92.55.
It's all really very simple. The concept of "you" or "me" is just that - an abstract concept. This concept only makes sense when certain conditions hold.
You can solve TSP for 1 million cities if you're willing to wait a few billion years
No you can't. You can't solve TSP for 1 million cities before the expected heat death of the universe.
Umm, do you have a proof of that?
After the betrayal that was "Lost", I'm no longer watching anything by J. J. Abrams. Apparently the latest model of attracting viewers is to keep throwing mysteries and questions on them, without any plan to ever answer them. This is not something I am interested in.
Compare "Lost" to "Babylon 5".
I recently gave up trying to explain to some mentally challenged person here on Slashdot the very simple concept of property ownership and how once somebody sells you something they literally have no rights over it. Morally, ethically, etc... no rights.
I don't think it's as clear cut as that. If I sell you a painting I made, would you not agree that I still have the right to say that I painted it? Would you say that you have the right to erase my signature, draw your own and tell everyone you painted it?
Assume that, to begin with, the car is moving at wind speed. The wheels are spinning (because the car is moving) and you can use that energy (i.e. brake the car) to push the propeller
No, you can't use that energy to move forward. The experiment boils down to two mediums moving relative to each other (we can choose to tie the coordinate system to the ground, to the wind, or at any constant speed). If you are stationary relative to one of the mediums, you can only use the other medium to change your velocity. You can only use it to change your velocity in the direction of the movement of that medium.
Imagine two opposing winds with between them, moving at the speed of wind1 (in its direction). Can you use wind2 to propel yourself in the direction of wind2?
As the grand-grand-parent says, however, it is very much possible to achieve the feat in the article by storing energy during the acceleration phase (you would end up accelerating slower than you would otherwise) and then once you reach wind speed, use that energy to move faster. Once that energy runs out, however, you will slow down to wind speed.
The string "SC2" is forever and ever reserved as an identifier for the best quest ever made, and a definite contender for the best game ever -- Star Control 2.
I'm probably too late to get modded up, but since none of the existing responses gave the exactly correct explanation, I'll have to post rather than moderated.
sqrt(1) is 1. It's not -1. By definition.
A list of transformations of an equality like the one given in the grandparent's "proof" is shorthand for a list of "implies" statements. For example, a proof like this:
is actually shorthand for:
When you rewrite the shorthand proof in the grandparent post in full form, the mistake becomes (more) obvious: a^2=b^2 does not imply that a=b. But this has nothing to do with the sqrt function, it is because of the square function; because it is not an injective (one-to-one) function.
To illustrate by taking it to an extreme - instead of f(x)=x^2, let's take a different non-injective function: f(x)=0. Would you have any trouble realizing that f(a)=f(b) does not imply a=b?
As an amusing curiosity, one way to define |x| (the absolute value of x) is sqrt(x^2). |x|, as you may guess, is also a non-injective function.
Uhh, what?
An algorithm that runs in n*log(n) is slower than n.
Also, big-O is the wrong thing to use here - you want little-o (or little-omega). An algorithm being O(f(n)) only means that the algorithm runs in (asymptotically) less than or same number of of steps as f(n). An algorithm that runs in k*log(n)+p steps is in O(n^2) and in O(n) and in O(log(n)). To show that an algorithm A (that runs in f(n) steps) is faster than algorithm B (that runs in g(n) steps) you need to show that g(n) is in w(f(n)) ('w' is little-omega), or conversely that f(n) is in o(g(n)) ('o' is little-o).
I hate the use of the equals sign with the asymptotical growth notations, because it is extremely confusing to people who forget that O(f(n)) is a set, as are o(f(n)), w(f(n) and Omega(f(n)). If you use '=', you get confusing things like n=O(n^2) and n^2=O(n^2), so one might deduce that n=n^2. So let's everyone agree to use \in instead of '=' from now on. OK?
Big-O Notation
As an avid EVE player and an experienced software developer, I can confidently tell you that from the perspective of software design and development EVE is a pile of steaming crap. Every new release breaks existing features and known bugs last for years. Much of the code, the developers themselves have admitted, can't be touched anymore because nobody understands how it works. Instead of fixing bugs, they write new features which are released unfinished and then promptly forgotten when the next expansion is due.
What keeps EVE afloat and myself playing the game is that the concept itself is amazing. The day I managed to load Elite on my Sinclair, I knew that the the same game, with added massively multiplayer gameplay over the network would be awesome.
Who in their right mind would compare codec quality by encoding screenshots in a lossy image format??? To add insult to injury, the GIF image files in the article have a .jpg extension.
This article, and the person who wrote it, are worse than useless.
I think this video illustrates it best:
Most of the examples where he tried to interact with the "game" and failed were simply not written to respond to iPad's touch events. It's pretty easy to add touch listeners, but they just haven't.
Uhh, except that Apple are at the forefront of developing those same new web technologies you're talking about. They are among the first to implement them in their web browser(s). You've just explained exactly why it's unlikely that Apple's reasons are what you say they are.
They would do better to remove the CAPS LOCK key, which is more bulky and - as far as I know - useful only to morons who don't know how to keep from SHOUTING on the internet.
I can't believe this is being repeated on slashdot of all places. Does nobody capitalize their constants anymore?? P.S. The otherwise lovely new Apple USB keyboard drives me insane when I use it to write code because of this feature (which I can't find how to disable).
"What about the environmental impact of the extra time required to write the same functionality in C++?"
Should be about equal to the environment impact of maintaining the PHP language itself; in fact, it is likely to be less than that, since there would be no need to maintain the actual interpreter, but only duplicate some functionality. This is really a one-off, and the libraries could be reused by thousands of enterprises.
You're making a strange argument. Why does maintaining the C++ language have less of an environmental impact than that of maintaining the PHP language?
Bugs and security breaches do not cause any more CO2 emission than bug-free code, so I do not really see your point in bringing them up.
So having a person wake up and drive to work to fix something in the middle of the night doesn't cause any pollution? And that's just a very minor issue (and minor impact). Serious bugs and security breaches can create a lot of extra work with a lot of environmental impact.
P.S. Due to the laws of thermodynamics, work is always (thermal) pollution :-)
That's a ridiculous way to analyze it. What about the environmental impact of the extra time required to write the same functionality in C++? What about the impact of whole classes of C++ bugs that don't exist in C++ (and, perhaps, vice versa) with the downtime or security breaches resulting from them? Or a hundred other ways in which writing all that software in C++ would be different of which I can't think at the moment?
LyX
With some practice (and appropriate shortcuts), you can enter formulas faster than you can write them down with a pen.
... will inevitably lead to a slow migration of the legal standard to an ever more permissive definition of provacative
A strictly increasing sequence can, nevertheless, have an upper bound.
While by no means a short game, I'd hardly call World of Goo lengthy. I recall spending months on Lemmings, an oldie in the same genre, with sometimes weeks on certain difficult levels. World of Goo took me a whole of a few days to finish. I'm looking forward to harder fan-made levels.
My GWT maps are just as smooth as Google Maps, and the library supports the WMS tiling protocol, which I'm guessing is what OpenStreeMap uses. I'll have to investigate and talk to the OpenStreetMap guys to maybe use my client.
I am a UI designer by trade, and many is the time I have thought about wading in to a F/LOSS project in order to improve the usability of the interface (last one I considered was IPCop).
Perhaps you should actually try before giving up. I'm sure there are many projects out there who would love to have a good UI designer on board. Heck, if you want to help me with my Jin client for chess servers, I would love every bit of what you could offer.
So they can have both then? :-)
The connection sucks for anything interactive
Except, possibly chess.
I know you were joking, but as an administrator on a chess server, I can tell you that people get pretty pissed off when lagging half a second. It's acceptable for playing long games, but most over-the-net chess games are 1 to 5 minutes per player per game. Yes, it's a whole different game that just shares moving rules with "chess".
He reasons that if reality was to do something that information processing cannot, then it cannot be virtual.
All it would mean is that the outside ("real") reality has processing capabilities qualitatively different (and superiour to) from the ones our reality, and are thus able to simulate it.