Re:How closely are the casino's being watched?
on
Net Vegas
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· Score: 2
This does not mean that if you have $100, you will walk away with $98, especially if you insist on betting all $100 on one throw. What it means is that over a statistically significant period of time, your wins and losses combined will relieve you (and everyone else participating in that game) of about 2% of your cash.
Actually, it means something else entriely. The amount you are expected to leave the table with is figured in as the drop, not the percentage here, which I believe is referred to as the "house edge." The house edge refers to the mathematical % that the house has on any one bet.
For instance, even in a game with a 1% house advantage, if played for a long enough of a time, the house can be expected to take ALL of your money. The "drop" as it is referred to, basically factors in three things: (1)house edge as a percentage, (2) average size bet, (3) number of bets per hour, and (4) time.
This is why, even though slot machines have house advantages similar to roulette, they tend to have a bigger drop. People play more bets per hour, and tend to stay at the machines for longer amounts of time.
But educators HAVE unions. At least in my state they do.
When I see people in technology working 80 and 90 hour weeks for $50k/yr, something tells me that unions would at least help this particular problem.
Don't know what your timeframe is on this CD, but 1.6.0 of FurthurNet should be out in the next few weeks; it promises a quantum leap in stability and memory performance over 1.5.9.
Bait Articles?
on
Gone Fission
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· Score: 2, Funny
I bet I fish more than 99.999% of the folks that read this (about 5 days a week from April-November) and even I can't believe Slashdot is now doing bait-and-tackle articles.
I do most of my coding in Java and I find that if variable and method names are sufficiently descriptive, while still keeping to (project/company) standards, then inline comments can be kept relatively sparse.
By and large, comments for "tricky" code, complex algorithms, or non-obvious functionality are all you need to make sure anyone can figure out what is going on in the code.
The one exception I make to this is to make sure every class and method is JavaDoc'ed extensively. This helps those people USING the class as much as it helps those who are maintaining/modifying the class. I find that overall it increases the quality of code and reduces bugs significantly.
Is it me or is KDE3 slow?
on
KDE 3.0 is Out
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· Score: 1
I installed the last rc (3?) of KDE3 and had to uninstall it because it slowed down my PC so much. I had to put it together piecemeal (some rpms and some tarballs) and in the end had to back it out. I am using 2.2.2 now and am very happy with it. Everyone else seems to love KDE3, so maybe there was something wrong with the rpms? Has anyone else had these problems?
...the reporter could have gotten more info if she didn't keep telling these people that she is a reporter?!?!
How's this for investigative journalism?
1. Locate Spammers
2. Call and explain to spammers that you are a reporter
3. Determine if spammer has hung up
4. If step 3 is yes, call spammer back and leave message
5. Repeat
What about the loss in quality from analog->wav? It's negligible [pineight.com], but it's still a measurable loss.
Actually most live music collectors, at least the hard-core ones, want ALL the details about the source for a given show- right down to the microphones used, and in some cases, the location of the taper at the show. Things like analog->wav and digital audio extraction should always be indicated in the source which is distributed with the files, regardless of whether the method of distributing is etree.org or furthur or something else entirely.
"Even Weed" - Tiki Barber
Besides the fancy protocols, the best features of Furthur, as I see it are the ones that make trading of shows easier. For instance:
* Files are associated with shows (ie band/date). So if I am downloading Grateful dead 8/27/72, I don't need to look for all of the individual songs. I just download the show and all the files are there.
* Support for MD5 checking. This ensures that a) all the files are there and b) it is an exact digital copy of the original seed. I can verify this with the etree database
Actually, the "dirtier" (ie the more ambient noise) the recording, the MORE you will notice the degradation in sound quality when using lossy compression.
I have gotten SHN filesets of audience recordings that have had an MP3 in their source history at some point and I noticed RIGHT AWAY.
Whose concerts are you compressing to 320MB? Most bands that allow trading play 2-3 hour shows, and no way you are going to get that down to 320MB.
On the link you provided, it shows that flac gives a 0.5296 compression ratio whereas Shorten is 0.5554. Flac certainly does better, but not enough to get those 4 hour Grateful Dead shows from '73 on one disc!
There is a SW company in Charlottesville, Virginia, called Macrosoft Systems. It's been around at least 4 years (maybe more), and I can't believe Gates hasn't gone down there to give them the ol' hook and ladder.
I like the bold. Clever.
I would still not say that NT 3/4 were stable.... maybe they were relatively stable compared to their home-use counterparts (3.1, 95) but driver incompatibilities and crashes were still rampant.
I think a lot of people on here are missing the point of design patterns. Patterns are not a replacement for *algorithms*, they are tools, or better yet, a common language, to describe how objects relate to each other and their basic purposes.
The porch example above, you will notice, says nothing of how to construct the porch, merely how it relates to the house and the people. It is not meant as a replacement for a skilled carpenter who knows how to create a porch that can withstand the weight needed or how to pour the foundation so that it lasts 30 or 50 years.
So the fact that a contractor or architect can use the language "they need a porch" has very little bearing on the quality of the implementation of that porch. Of course, when building systems, if you can say "he needs a porch (or a factory, etc), you don't need to spend days or weeks figuring out what a porch does, and you can actually focus on how you will implement this porch.
The fact that you are using an example in C doesn't help your argument. Nothing stops an OO programmer from reading others' code to see implementations of algorithms OR patterns. I don't know where the comment "...in the object-oriented world, people do not want to be bothered with the problem of reading others code, or thinking for themselves.." is coming from but that has certainly not been my experience with programmers in the OO world.
I actually think the book and the movie were written simultaneously by Clarke and Kubrick. I may be mistaken, but the version of the book I have has a preface written by Clarke where he describes how they approached the writing.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it means something else entriely. The amount you are expected to leave the table with is figured in as the drop, not the percentage here, which I believe is referred to as the "house edge." The house edge refers to the mathematical % that the house has on any one bet. For instance, even in a game with a 1% house advantage, if played for a long enough of a time, the house can be expected to take ALL of your money. The "drop" as it is referred to, basically factors in three things: (1)house edge as a percentage, (2) average size bet, (3) number of bets per hour, and (4) time.
This is why, even though slot machines have house advantages similar to roulette, they tend to have a bigger drop. People play more bets per hour, and tend to stay at the machines for longer amounts of time.
But educators HAVE unions. At least in my state they do. When I see people in technology working 80 and 90 hour weeks for $50k/yr, something tells me that unions would at least help this particular problem.
That seems pretty damn creative to me!
Don't know what your timeframe is on this CD, but 1.6.0 of FurthurNet should be out in the next few weeks; it promises a quantum leap in stability and memory performance over 1.5.9.
I bet I fish more than 99.999% of the folks that read this (about 5 days a week from April-November) and even I can't believe Slashdot is now doing bait-and-tackle articles.
By and large, comments for "tricky" code, complex algorithms, or non-obvious functionality are all you need to make sure anyone can figure out what is going on in the code.
The one exception I make to this is to make sure every class and method is JavaDoc'ed extensively. This helps those people USING the class as much as it helps those who are maintaining/modifying the class. I find that overall it increases the quality of code and reduces bugs significantly.
I installed the last rc (3?) of KDE3 and had to uninstall it because it slowed down my PC so much. I had to put it together piecemeal (some rpms and some tarballs) and in the end had to back it out.
I am using 2.2.2 now and am very happy with it.
Everyone else seems to love KDE3, so maybe there was something wrong with the rpms? Has anyone else had these problems?
Amazing for a town where indoor plumbing is still considered a luxury.
I guess when I think "Investigative Reporter," I think "Fletch."
...the reporter could have gotten more info if she didn't keep telling these people that she is a reporter?!?!
How's this for investigative journalism?
1. Locate Spammers
2. Call and explain to spammers that you are a reporter
3. Determine if spammer has hung up
4. If step 3 is yes, call spammer back and leave message
5. Repeat
How is that offtopic?
Actually most live music collectors, at least the hard-core ones, want ALL the details about the source for a given show- right down to the microphones used, and in some cases, the location of the taper at the show. Things like analog->wav and digital audio extraction should always be indicated in the source which is distributed with the files, regardless of whether the method of distributing is etree.org or furthur or something else entirely. "Even Weed" - Tiki Barber
* Files are associated with shows (ie band/date). So if I am downloading Grateful dead 8/27/72, I don't need to look for all of the individual songs. I just download the show and all the files are there.
* Support for MD5 checking. This ensures that a) all the files are there and b) it is an exact digital copy of the original seed. I can verify this with the etree database
I imagine this has to do with memory allocation but not 100% sure.
"Even Weed" -Tiki Barber
Great community and a great concept though.
Actually, the "dirtier" (ie the more ambient noise) the recording, the MORE you will notice the degradation in sound quality when using lossy compression. I have gotten SHN filesets of audience recordings that have had an MP3 in their source history at some point and I noticed RIGHT AWAY.
On the link you provided, it shows that flac gives a 0.5296 compression ratio whereas Shorten is 0.5554. Flac certainly does better, but not enough to get those 4 hour Grateful Dead shows from '73 on one disc!
There is a SW company in Charlottesville, Virginia, called Macrosoft Systems. It's been around at least 4 years (maybe more), and I can't believe Gates hasn't gone down there to give them the ol' hook and ladder.
I like the bold. Clever. I would still not say that NT 3/4 were stable.... maybe they were relatively stable compared to their home-use counterparts (3.1, 95) but driver incompatibilities and crashes were still rampant.
I think a lot of people on here are missing the point of design patterns. Patterns are not a replacement for *algorithms*, they are tools, or better yet, a common language, to describe how objects relate to each other and their basic purposes.
The porch example above, you will notice, says nothing of how to construct the porch, merely how it relates to the house and the people. It is not meant as a replacement for a skilled carpenter who knows how to create a porch that can withstand the weight needed or how to pour the foundation so that it lasts 30 or 50 years.
So the fact that a contractor or architect can use the language "they need a porch" has very little bearing on the quality of the implementation of that porch. Of course, when building systems, if you can say "he needs a porch (or a factory, etc), you don't need to spend days or weeks figuring out what a porch does, and you can actually focus on how you will implement this porch.
The fact that you are using an example in C doesn't help your argument. Nothing stops an OO programmer from reading others' code to see implementations of algorithms OR patterns. I don't know where the comment "...in the object-oriented world, people do not want to be bothered with the problem of reading others code, or thinking for themselves.." is coming from but that has certainly not been my experience with programmers in the OO world.
I actually think the book and the movie were written simultaneously by Clarke and Kubrick. I may be mistaken, but the version of the book I have has a preface written by Clarke where he describes how they approached the writing.