Group work in a school setting produces smart students who don't excel because they're holding up the rest of the group, mediocre students who can slack because the intelligent ones will do the work for them, and slow students who never get the attention they deserve.
you forgot smart students who don't excel because they forsee the pointlessness of school in general.
even if they guy who implimented the experiment doesn't think it should be used as a model for how people work, someone dumb down the line will. Its crappy to see things like this implimented, especially in a public type setting (like school). home schooling for everyone! =)
Re:Lunar mining could change orbits and weather!
on
Mining On The Moon
·
· Score: 1
yes, it would affect the orbit. every time you throw a rock, you affect the direction and velocity of the earth ever so slightly.
the good thing is that it probably wo'nt matter much.
even the most fruitful mining attempts wouldn't remove 1% of the moon's mass. the change in mass between the earth and the moon would be so little that it's very likly not an issue.
Re:GTK Seems solid, but slow on Solaris
on
GTK-- vs. QT
·
· Score: 1
a while back, i decided to try my hand at both qt and gtk. unfortunatly, the only machine i had access to was an old 486sx33. after about a day, i gave up:^) . gtk was faster on (the ancient)x86, qt is horribly slow.
another drawback it qt's really slow textmode, which is, as already stated, really slow.
gtk's design is going crazy though. simplicity is definatly with qt.
Does anyone else find the blatent hypocrisy so common in the us government to be painfully annoying? they try to make cracking encryption illgeal (dcma/dmca whatever), then they pull out this, and its legit? further, they make virus writing a punishable offence, and this also makes use of virus like tendancies (perhaps. could be a trojan). wtf? this is similar to speed limits where police go much faster to make exciting chases. while technically, they are not supposed to, very few are going to stop them, or even suggest it. this is yet another reason to use linux; no complaints there:^)
where does it end? with the way things are going, it looks like orwell was a mere 20 years early.. welcome to 2004
ive been coding for years (near 10 now maybe?), and after finding a social life in high school, i always go thru a huge depression when i lose that social life (because of more school, work, someone moves/decides to hate me/decides other people are more l337/whatever). i still program, but i find computers do not stimulate me the way people do.
agreed, everyone has their own interface. but imagine how many problems will pop up when there is no longer a standard 'right click on My Computer, right click C:, click format. then install Linux' chain of commands to fix things when users are dumb. Tech support over the phone would be a nightmare. further, how about when you borrow someone elses box, or a public computer. those are bound to be different. those would unfortunatly make things difficult =(
perhaps a key that represents the desktops confiuration.. it might be too big to remember though. *shrugs*
first off: MAN! this freaking makes me so mad when companies patent crap that i independantly discovered back in the days of qbasic. grr.
now: fprime. what the hell is that, you ask?
simple: a couple years ago, we were trying to make a fast alpha blender. we started with the (apparently patented)
result=(alpha*source+~alpha*destination) idea.
however, we realized this: the image stores both alpha channel, and the color data. for every pixel, a known value is calculated when it could be stored. thus, itwe store the inverted alpha, and a 'sum color' that is to be added.
thus, you get
result=(alpha*destinan)+source;
to get the 'fprimed' source, you simply do a source=source*alpha.
this removes nearly half the computation time (1 mult instead of two), and saves an inversion. more importantly, it uses a different blending model, so apple patents will hopefully not apply (ianal).
this method is of our own invention, please give us credit, or at least mail me if you find it useful (assuming someone else didnt patent it first:^)
try this fun experiment:
go to the local super market
buy a gallon of milk for two dollars
sell the milk in half gallon quantites, a 75 cents each.
repeat
after selling several hundred gallons, look at how rich you are
yes, this works (done it a few times, usually with cassette tapes i wanted to rip though).
the onyl bad part about using this method is lost quality from line noise, the extra da/ad conversion (if from a cd, tapes are analogue already), and from lousy sound cards, which i have at present (that makes all samples biased a little bit). this, to me, is the simplest way around ripping 'protected' cds that work in regular cd players. no way to prevent/protect this route.
Its not a matter of being smarter than the compiler's programmer, but being smarter than the writer was willing to be.
There are _many_ times when one does indeed know that they are smarter than the compiler, and using C to circumvent this provides a program with a faster execution speed, a smaller executable size, or both.
The benefits (imho) outweigh the added cost of going thru your code and making sure its good on your own. for the record, there is no excuse for bad code, the coder was simply lazy, or didnt both to check their code. automated checking might have its uses, but there are still many places where this type of autmoation will trip and call you a bad coder.
Re:why so negative towards xbox?
on
XBox Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
First, yes, the/. community is very anti-m$. with good reason too. i actually support them usually (i have having to reboot win every 3 hours becasue it leaks too much, while i easily get months of uptime with linux and bang on it more too, among other things).
But, in regards to the Gamecube, I have _no_ idea why it isnt hammered as well. do the/. readers not know how much nintendo is like m$, esp when it comes to emulation etc? given that both companies are similar (anti-open), i'd think they'd both get knocked at least a little.
i recall hearing about an open game console. did this ever happen?
for years, I've been a die-hard C fan. code for speed, speed, size, and then speed again. I've made a few feeble attempts to learn Lisp, but they never really went anywhere. However, after reading the examples he provides, the lisp notation (pre/postfix?) seems very logical. Much more clever than the whole PEMDAS nonsense. I am guessing that, much like linux/windows, c/lisp each have their strengths and weaknesses.
being a game coder (small time), i woudl honestly love to believe that. but the truth is, there isnt much genius. yes, there are streaks of it. the quake engine is brilliant, as is the new quake3 engine. other engines for everything. but most games do nothign amazing. DirectX makes the game coder lazy (hey, why should the coder know how to draw graphics? sound? network support?) Same with OpenGL, but every game is made for windows these days (which is unfortunate).
also, many new games are clones of old games. real time stratagy (age of empires, starcraft, warcraft, etc)) is popular, as is 1st person shooter (you know the drill).
there are breaks from this though. they probably require more, as libraries aren't built around them as much (looks at the sims cd on his desk).
yes, some innovation actualyl happens, but its far simpler to drag and drop in libraries and have someone make bitmaps and mp3's to go with it.
this has little to do with it being art though.
lots of art is also based on a genre, and the tools for it are more developed for common art mediums. it parallels nicly.
silly capitalist =) the only reason it worked was because almost no one had burners, and 486's didnt play mp3's well. with modern (even 4+ years old) hardware, copying is completely possible. thus, one can go and download a song, and burn it on cd, or they can buy the real deal. hmm, what a choice.
now, as you say, the model works. if it does, why are they now looking more and more into these copy prevention measures that were rarely seen in earlier times? so, because people are making their own rather than lining the pockets of record makers, they lose money, and have to protect their investment. ergo: copy protection (which usually doesnt work, but if it makes one more perosn buy a cd, they're happy i guess)
And using it would be VIOLATE THE LICENSE of the code which MS staff are forbidden by their employer to do.
when was something illegal/unethical a point in stopping M$ from doing anything?
also, the possibility of legal reverse engineering exists, and M$ has more than enough employees to do it effectively.
basic process is something like this (iirc):
1 employee looks at code, analyzes how it works, and writes the how it works part down.
another employee who has never looked at the code looks at the how it works doc, and writes their own.
amazing, i tell ya. M$ has prolly never even bothered to assign 2 people to one piece of code.
I disagree with the tattooing thing, that seems far too SS/Nazi to do. also, there are many groups that are against body modifications, and that just wouldn't fly with them.
But the idea od md5summing someone's dna to get a number is actually quite good. Given a reliable algorthm (not sure if md5sum is ok for this), this could indeed do proper identification that cannot be stolen (unless someone steals your right arm and attaches it to themselves or whatever). im not sure how dna works with donated blood, donated organs, and identical twins though (twins have same dna iirc).
what would enhance this would be a device that can take a sample of someone's dna, and give the number in a quick amount of time.
in reading very fresh articles, first posts are still present.
case in point:
the transmeta article of yesterday revealed a first post message (before mine, obviously) for a while. now its gone though (was as of yesterday afternoon)
thats not really a bad thing, considering how their products never really were that useful to begin with. their research (if any) in regards to lower power consumption could to sold to other companies to keep their systems cooler (*ahem* amd *ahem*). but, performance-wise, they were nothing special. *shrugs* sorry guys. so many other sources of power drain (harddrive, lcd screen, gfx cards) that the cpu isnt the only battery drain in even semi recent laptops anymore.
but i went through a similar phase about a year ago. I just had to quit. there was no point in coding, creating, breaking or anything. with the time i took off, i did other things completely not related to cs, and when i came back, i was completely refreshed. i have now started several personal projects, which also helps, and i have so many going that when one gets boring, i change to another one. this keeps me from getting stale, but also keeps me from getting anything done in a timly fashon. doing stuff out of books is lame, but thats the only way overpaid teachers know how to do their job. do your own stuff, solve your own interesting problems, and keep it to be what you like. real life will be just like school (boring code), but its all you can hope for.
well, modern processors are well adapted in that they have lots of tricks to get things done quickly. they exploit effects of the physical silicon they are composed of. meanwhile, fpgas are only able to emulate that, at a speed cost. an example is the cmos 2 collecter and gate, which is essentially composed of only one transistor, allowing it to operate very quickly, versus the fpga and gate, which uses definatly >2 transistors.
making them embarassingly parallel would simply _kill_ serial processors speed-wise, but only where the process is parallel to begin with. in theory, you could make an equivalently parallel cmos (non-reconfigurable) processor, and jack the clock up much higher than an fpga would tolerate.
this is exactly what many good video cards do, but in a specialized manner. same with high end sound etc. the idea of putting powerful cpu's on cards is probably as ancient as cards themselves.
as has been noted before, this would really be useful if the pci bus was extended (faster/wider). of course, making it faster/wider gives you what sgi has been doing for a while too (also mentioned above).
perhaps the most dissapointing thing is that all that power goes to waste on users playing solitare, running windows, aol, and quake, not on something that will actually need the power to perform the tasks. well, maybe quake isnt so bad...
Also, referencing The Diamond Age, who is to say that the protocol on making them oxidizable is to be followed. Sure, one can put up guidelines, but guarantee me that they will be followed. sure, they will when companies have to be federally regulated etc, but what about when everyone gets their own 12x8x32x nanite burner, and starts craking out stuff that doesn't adhere to the protocol.
not to mention the very limiting use/application base when they need inert gasses (so much for oil spills).
Exactly! you have hit the nail on the head, my friend. it's all in how you learn about it.
you grew up in a house (or appartment, or box, or whatever). because it did not fall on you, you felt comfortable around it, similar to the group that was educated 'properly.' because of this, you don't panic when you move, go into someone elses house where furniture is different, or someone paints the walls different colors.
the parallels to a user interface and a house are astounding, come ot think of it =)
because we grow up in houses, we don't feel intimidated by it. but we aren't raised in the same situation in regards to other things, like computers, cars, cd's, and anything more complex than paper and pencil.
by current trends, most things are 'simply too complex' for anyone not a geek to learn (sarcasm). when one's car breaks, how do you fix it? many do not even try to diagnose the problem, they simply take it to a repair shop, and get raped by the price tag, but feel secure knowing that someone else is a geek, not them. "Why should _I_ have to know how _my own_ car works?" mentality is very prevalent, and i believe that it will only continue. The number of idiots teaching people to be sheep is increasing faster than the number of stages in a p4's pipeline. and, at least here in the states, continue to push for more education funding, which unfortunately does very little educating. mostly rote learning.
I read recently that ms coders are now working on the next version of windows, which is supposed to have a 3d gui. upon reading this, i was curious as to who had produced a 3d gui for them to steal. haha only serious, this article pops up. given ms's track record for stealing ideas, this seems likly to be next. =(
or, maybe, there are lots of 3d gui's around, and i am not up with the times *shrugs*
Slashdot Mirror
Group work in a school setting produces smart students who don't excel because they're holding up the rest of the group, mediocre students who can slack because the intelligent ones will do the work for them, and slow students who never get the attention they deserve.
you forgot smart students who don't excel because they forsee the pointlessness of school in general.
even if they guy who implimented the experiment doesn't think it should be used as a model for how people work, someone dumb down the line will. Its crappy to see things like this implimented, especially in a public type setting (like school). home schooling for everyone! =)
yes, it would affect the orbit. every time you throw a rock, you affect the direction and velocity of the earth ever so slightly.
the good thing is that it probably wo'nt matter much.
even the most fruitful mining attempts wouldn't remove 1% of the moon's mass. the change in mass between the earth and the moon would be so little that it's very likly not an issue.
a while back, i decided to try my hand at both qt and gtk. unfortunatly, the only machine i had access to was an old 486sx33. after about a day, i gave up :^) . gtk was faster on (the ancient)x86, qt is horribly slow.
another drawback it qt's really slow textmode, which is, as already stated, really slow.
gtk's design is going crazy though. simplicity is definatly with qt.
Does anyone else find the blatent hypocrisy so common in the us government to be painfully annoying? they try to make cracking encryption illgeal (dcma/dmca whatever), then they pull out this, and its legit? further, they make virus writing a punishable offence, and this also makes use of virus like tendancies (perhaps. could be a trojan). wtf? this is similar to speed limits where police go much faster to make exciting chases. while technically, they are not supposed to, very few are going to stop them, or even suggest it. this is yet another reason to use linux; no complaints there :^)
where does it end? with the way things are going, it looks like orwell was a mere 20 years early.. welcome to 2004
sorry to be redundant, but i _also_ disagree =)
ive been coding for years (near 10 now maybe?), and after finding a social life in high school, i always go thru a huge depression when i lose that social life (because of more school, work, someone moves/decides to hate me/decides other people are more l337/whatever). i still program, but i find computers do not stimulate me the way people do.
"No No Bad kernel! oops on the paper"
agreed, everyone has their own interface. but imagine how many problems will pop up when there is no longer a standard 'right click on My Computer, right click C:, click format. then install Linux' chain of commands to fix things when users are dumb. Tech support over the phone would be a nightmare. further, how about when you borrow someone elses box, or a public computer. those are bound to be different. those would unfortunatly make things difficult =(
perhaps a key that represents the desktops confiuration.. it might be too big to remember though. *shrugs*
doh, that was quite a mistake on my part, forgetting to throw in the starting capital. my bad, you win =) (note to self: closed mouth gathers no foot)
first off: MAN! this freaking makes me so mad when companies patent crap that i independantly discovered back in the days of qbasic. grr.
:^)
now: fprime. what the hell is that, you ask?
simple: a couple years ago, we were trying to make a fast alpha blender. we started with the (apparently patented)
result=(alpha*source+~alpha*destination) idea.
however, we realized this: the image stores both alpha channel, and the color data. for every pixel, a known value is calculated when it could be stored. thus, itwe store the inverted alpha, and a 'sum color' that is to be added.
thus, you get
result=(alpha*destinan)+source;
to get the 'fprimed' source, you simply do a source=source*alpha.
this removes nearly half the computation time (1 mult instead of two), and saves an inversion. more importantly, it uses a different blending model, so apple patents will hopefully not apply (ianal).
this method is of our own invention, please give us credit, or at least mail me if you find it useful (assuming someone else didnt patent it first
really?
try this fun experiment:
go to the local super market
buy a gallon of milk for two dollars
sell the milk in half gallon quantites, a 75 cents each.
repeat
after selling several hundred gallons, look at how rich you are
yes, this works (done it a few times, usually with cassette tapes i wanted to rip though).
the onyl bad part about using this method is lost quality from line noise, the extra da/ad conversion (if from a cd, tapes are analogue already), and from lousy sound cards, which i have at present (that makes all samples biased a little bit). this, to me, is the simplest way around ripping 'protected' cds that work in regular cd players. no way to prevent/protect this route.
Its not a matter of being smarter than the compiler's programmer, but being smarter than the writer was willing to be.
There are _many_ times when one does indeed know that they are smarter than the compiler, and using C to circumvent this provides a program with a faster execution speed, a smaller executable size, or both.
The benefits (imho) outweigh the added cost of going thru your code and making sure its good on your own. for the record, there is no excuse for bad code, the coder was simply lazy, or didnt both to check their code. automated checking might have its uses, but there are still many places where this type of autmoation will trip and call you a bad coder.
First, yes, the /. community is very anti-m$. with good reason too. i actually support them usually (i have having to reboot win every 3 hours becasue it leaks too much, while i easily get months of uptime with linux and bang on it more too, among other things).
/. readers not know how much nintendo is like m$, esp when it comes to emulation etc? given that both companies are similar (anti-open), i'd think they'd both get knocked at least a little.
But, in regards to the Gamecube, I have _no_ idea why it isnt hammered as well. do the
i recall hearing about an open game console. did this ever happen?
for years, I've been a die-hard C fan. code for speed, speed, size, and then speed again. I've made a few feeble attempts to learn Lisp, but they never really went anywhere. However, after reading the examples he provides, the lisp notation (pre/postfix?) seems very logical. Much more clever than the whole PEMDAS nonsense. I am guessing that, much like linux/windows, c/lisp each have their strengths and weaknesses.
just my 2 cents
creative genius behind todays great games? haha.
being a game coder (small time), i woudl honestly love to believe that. but the truth is, there isnt much genius. yes, there are streaks of it. the quake engine is brilliant, as is the new quake3 engine. other engines for everything. but most games do nothign amazing. DirectX makes the game coder lazy (hey, why should the coder know how to draw graphics? sound? network support?) Same with OpenGL, but every game is made for windows these days (which is unfortunate).
also, many new games are clones of old games. real time stratagy (age of empires, starcraft, warcraft, etc)) is popular, as is 1st person shooter (you know the drill).
there are breaks from this though. they probably require more, as libraries aren't built around them as much (looks at the sims cd on his desk).
yes, some innovation actualyl happens, but its far simpler to drag and drop in libraries and have someone make bitmaps and mp3's to go with it.
this has little to do with it being art though.
lots of art is also based on a genre, and the tools for it are more developed for common art mediums. it parallels nicly.
silly capitalist =) the only reason it worked was because almost no one had burners, and 486's didnt play mp3's well. with modern (even 4+ years old) hardware, copying is completely possible. thus, one can go and download a song, and burn it on cd, or they can buy the real deal. hmm, what a choice.
now, as you say, the model works. if it does, why are they now looking more and more into these copy prevention measures that were rarely seen in earlier times? so, because people are making their own rather than lining the pockets of record makers, they lose money, and have to protect their investment. ergo: copy protection (which usually doesnt work, but if it makes one more perosn buy a cd, they're happy i guess)
And using it would be VIOLATE THE LICENSE of the code which MS staff are forbidden by their employer to do. when was something illegal/unethical a point in stopping M$ from doing anything? also, the possibility of legal reverse engineering exists, and M$ has more than enough employees to do it effectively. basic process is something like this (iirc): 1 employee looks at code, analyzes how it works, and writes the how it works part down. another employee who has never looked at the code looks at the how it works doc, and writes their own. amazing, i tell ya. M$ has prolly never even bothered to assign 2 people to one piece of code.
I disagree with the tattooing thing, that seems far too SS/Nazi to do. also, there are many groups that are against body modifications, and that just wouldn't fly with them.
:^)
But the idea od md5summing someone's dna to get a number is actually quite good. Given a reliable algorthm (not sure if md5sum is ok for this), this could indeed do proper identification that cannot be stolen (unless someone steals your right arm and attaches it to themselves or whatever). im not sure how dna works with donated blood, donated organs, and identical twins though (twins have same dna iirc).
what would enhance this would be a device that can take a sample of someone's dna, and give the number in a quick amount of time.
good idea in my book
in reading very fresh articles, first posts are still present.
/. enough =)
case in point:
the transmeta article of yesterday revealed a first post message (before mine, obviously) for a while. now its gone though (was as of yesterday afternoon)
so, i guess you're just not reading
thats not really a bad thing, considering how their products never really were that useful to begin with. their research (if any) in regards to lower power consumption could to sold to other companies to keep their systems cooler (*ahem* amd *ahem*). but, performance-wise, they were nothing special. *shrugs* sorry guys. so many other sources of power drain (harddrive, lcd screen, gfx cards) that the cpu isnt the only battery drain in even semi recent laptops anymore.
someone may have alreadt said this.
but i went through a similar phase about a year ago. I just had to quit. there was no point in coding, creating, breaking or anything. with the time i took off, i did other things completely not related to cs, and when i came back, i was completely refreshed. i have now started several personal projects, which also helps, and i have so many going that when one gets boring, i change to another one. this keeps me from getting stale, but also keeps me from getting anything done in a timly fashon. doing stuff out of books is lame, but thats the only way overpaid teachers know how to do their job. do your own stuff, solve your own interesting problems, and keep it to be what you like. real life will be just like school (boring code), but its all you can hope for.
well, modern processors are well adapted in that they have lots of tricks to get things done quickly. they exploit effects of the physical silicon they are composed of. meanwhile, fpgas are only able to emulate that, at a speed cost. an example is the cmos 2 collecter and gate, which is essentially composed of only one transistor, allowing it to operate very quickly, versus the fpga and gate, which uses definatly >2 transistors.
making them embarassingly parallel would simply _kill_ serial processors speed-wise, but only where the process is parallel to begin with. in theory, you could make an equivalently parallel cmos (non-reconfigurable) processor, and jack the clock up much higher than an fpga would tolerate.
this is exactly what many good video cards do, but in a specialized manner. same with high end sound etc. the idea of putting powerful cpu's on cards is probably as ancient as cards themselves.
as has been noted before, this would really be useful if the pci bus was extended (faster/wider). of course, making it faster/wider gives you what sgi has been doing for a while too (also mentioned above).
perhaps the most dissapointing thing is that all that power goes to waste on users playing solitare, running windows, aol, and quake, not on something that will actually need the power to perform the tasks. well, maybe quake isnt so bad...
Also, referencing The Diamond Age, who is to say that the protocol on making them oxidizable is to be followed. Sure, one can put up guidelines, but guarantee me that they will be followed. sure, they will when companies have to be federally regulated etc, but what about when everyone gets their own 12x8x32x nanite burner, and starts craking out stuff that doesn't adhere to the protocol. not to mention the very limiting use/application base when they need inert gasses (so much for oil spills).
Exactly! you have hit the nail on the head, my friend. it's all in how you learn about it.
you grew up in a house (or appartment, or box, or whatever). because it did not fall on you, you felt comfortable around it, similar to the group that was educated 'properly.' because of this, you don't panic when you move, go into someone elses house where furniture is different, or someone paints the walls different colors.
the parallels to a user interface and a house are astounding, come ot think of it =)
because we grow up in houses, we don't feel intimidated by it. but we aren't raised in the same situation in regards to other things, like computers, cars, cd's, and anything more complex than paper and pencil.
by current trends, most things are 'simply too complex' for anyone not a geek to learn (sarcasm). when one's car breaks, how do you fix it? many do not even try to diagnose the problem, they simply take it to a repair shop, and get raped by the price tag, but feel secure knowing that someone else is a geek, not them. "Why should _I_ have to know how _my own_ car works?" mentality is very prevalent, and i believe that it will only continue. The number of idiots teaching people to be sheep is increasing faster than the number of stages in a p4's pipeline. and, at least here in the states, continue to push for more education funding, which unfortunately does very little educating. mostly rote learning.
I read recently that ms coders are now working on the next version of windows, which is supposed to have a 3d gui. upon reading this, i was curious as to who had produced a 3d gui for them to steal. haha only serious, this article pops up. given ms's track record for stealing ideas, this seems likly to be next. =(
or, maybe, there are lots of 3d gui's around, and i am not up with the times *shrugs*