> Do you implement an efficient sorting > algorithm? No. You type in the quickest thing > possible to get the job done.
Exactly! That's why you'd program selection sort or extraction sort instead of bubble sort.
Hell, I don't even remember any of them exactly. I'd write a double loop that pulled the highest key out on each decreasing n value. Which one was that now?
About 10 years ago when C++ was still fairly new, I had a project at grad school where I had to sort something. The compiler compiled but the program crashed. I checked and checked and checked, but there was nothing wrong with my program.
Not one damned thing.
It turns out the qsort was a C library, but I was calling it from a.cpp file. Thus the C function in the.cpp file was C++ call stack oriented, and the callback from qsort choked.
The compiler was too stupid to recognize this for some reason.
It's several incidents like that that have made me a brutish, hulking figure who swears, drinks beer, and loathes "God" the way Mark Twain used to.
I've always found selection sort to be easier to program and understand than bubble sort.
You are right, though, about time not being much of an issue anymore. Why even bother with linked lists when you can just load all the stuff into a giant array? For $200 you can get a Gig of RAM.
I've even used gigantic arrays for database storage in a CE device. They are, after all, identical to a random access file of fixed record size, one of the cornerstones of computer science as data processing.
Actually, since you have to run through all the items to make sure they're sorted, you can't do better than O(n).
Even where the cardinal value of the keys are the ordinal value in the sort (e.g. key translates directly to position in an array), you're still at O(n).
Besides, I can define a faster lightning sort as long as you rely on side effects rather than on return value.
Actually, there are other N2 sort algorithms that are better than bubble sort, so you wouldn't even use that on the small arrays at the end of quicksort.
As a TA once told my class, "Don't use bubble sort. It's dumb."
It is, though, not the worst sorting method. The worst was permutation sort, where you permuted the items, checked if they were sorted, then permuted them again and again until they were sorted.
> It's hard to beleive that the revenue from > domain owners they manage to trick is worth more > than the damage to their brand.
It reminds me of a scam used against high school students. When I was in HS some, shit, damnit, almost 20 years ago, I got a letter as a senior about how my senior class photo session was scheduled at so and so a time.
Problem was, it wasn't by the "official" company. You could, of course, as a senior have some other company take your photograph, but this company sent out official looking letters to make you think they were the one. Quite smarmy, and I would have fallen for it had not a friend pointed that out. (Not that I had any loyalty to the company that was the official school photographer. For your senior pics you go to the studio anyway, not the school library.)
Actually, the slo-mo film I saw on National Geographic twenty years ago showed cats whipped their tail around to right themselves, and could do so quite nicely from a distance of a foot or so, thank you very much.
Last time I checked, a foot was a lot less than a few stories.
Secondly, animals are not perfect. My wife's cats konk their heads, bodies, whatever, on things all the time. A cat would be far more likely to survive a 2 story drop than a 23 story one. A cat's terminal velocity would probably not be reached in only 23 stories (someone can run the numbers), but in any event, their bodies are big enough, which is to say, massive enough to crack and burst organs on impact.
What the hell are these people thinking? A cat twirls its tail to make sure it lands on its feet. I saw this on National Geographic or something twenty years ago, in slo-mo.
Which side lands down has nothing to do with center of gravity (directly) and everything to do with air resistance on various parts of the object (which force the object to turn, subject to rotational inertia about the center of gravity in that plane.)
Why buttered bread lands butter-down has more to do with the number of rotations on average when tumbling off a counter or hand. One half rotation = butter down, one = bread, one and a half = butter, and so on. You can see statistically how the butter/jelly side will win out most of the time.
That explanation I made up, it's obvious to me mathematically, but I've learned that things obvious to me aren't to others, so have fun. Someone go write a paper and quote me, thanks for asking.
> Perhaps the Antichrist will put in an appearence.
Given that the current Christ/God sits up there, infinitely powerful, as children are raped and tortured and murdered, and still calls Himself "good", I don't see how the Antichrist would be anything but a blessing.
Remember that Yaweh is the fuckhead who, knowingly, gave us intelligence, i.e. knowledge of good and evil, then cast us out.
For you cannot overcome the brute fact that, while it may be in the nature of an infinitely powerful and good being to create self-aware beings, it does not follow you put them in a universe where they can torture and murder each other. Sit and judge with me: that god is fucked up.
I bought a new house whose address was "368". The sales lady told me a Chinese couple would be jealous because having an address whose digits are increasing is lucky.
Speaking of different names, there were tons of clones, too.
Ahh, the memories:
Megaroids -- Would not run on my new Mac Plus from the Umich computer kickoff, while it would run on everyone else's. None of their diagnostic programs could find a problem.
Hemiroids -- A joke name, the game consisted of 3-D prerendered Hemi-asteroids, or asteroids cut in half. Beyond the name, the game was one of the better implementations.
Overpowered bad guy threatens to kill good guy sidekicks.
Best good guy sidekick starts grunting for twenty minutes to build up power. Overpowered bad guy floats there doing nothing. Splice in B story about Goku being somewhere for some reason.
Good guy sidekick shoots bad guy, with varying degrees of success, mostly bad. Bad guy coughs, spits out something about his eye sensor not detecting such power, but that it was not good enough!
Good guy sidekicks despair, then, tune in next episode!
Calahan: I know what you're thinking, punk. You're thinking, did he fire one hundred forty four shots or only one hundred forty three? Well to tell you the truth, I forgot myself in all this excitement. But being as this is a 144 Magnum, the most powerful rubberbandgun in the world and will blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself a question: "Do I feel lucky?" Well do ya...punk?
This is a threat to those countries that make nuclear weapons, suitcase or otherwise, that if one gets into a US city by way of black market and Al Queyda, taking out the source, i.e. China or the former USSR, of those weapons is still an option "on the table".
It is wrenching the arm behind the back of these countries to get them to help us track every single one of those possible weapons.
Think about it:
- Create shadow government "just in case" - Float trial balloons to scare the public - Finally, issue threat
It will help focus the concentration of these governments who say "You know, it may or may not have been sold on the black market, we're not too sure where it is." Help focus the concentration wonderfully.
Arguably the most important thing that didn't happen was that ancient Greece never thought to use its simple toy steam engines to do real work. Had they, people would have been on the moon almost 2 kiloyears ago, and we would be living in some far-future world where life was indefinitely long, all technological problems were solved, and there was nothing to do but temporarily wipe your mind and live in a virtual reality world of some relatively ancient times...
...nevermind. Move along now. Nothing to see here. Go back to posting about "hot, relevant topics" and watching The Man Show, and getting bent out of shape over elections and wars.
> How is a system fair and free when 80%+ of the > SU wealth is held by less than 10% of the > population?
How is that wrong? That is nothing more than a meaningless rhetorical tool used to stir up the masses against a meaningless and nonexistant "problem".
It's fair because it's free. It's free because it's the result of freedom, the freedom to pursue your own life. The phantom statistic is meaningless. To see what happens when 100% is owned by the common man, just look to the broken, retrograde economies of pre-freedom eastern Europe.
> How can you defend the holders of that wealth > who obviously are not doing their part to help > those less fortunate?
Last time I checked, they were paying a hell of a lot more in taxes each year than you probably would earn in a lifetime.
Even labeling the poor as "less fortunate" is a misnomer. Given that, in a free country, life is what you make of it, giving them that name is rhetoric to smear over any lack of responsibility that may exist.
> Saying Communism doesn't work because the last > time it was tried it failed is like saying that > Computers/Internet/Biotech are a bad idea > because the companies that started originally > are mostly in bad shape or bankrupt.
Tens of millions, many tens of millions, died under communism because of communism's primary feature -- "the people" were not free to pursue their own economic agendas. Yes, it turns out, it does matter that people follow their own agendas for survival. The starvation of those 10's of megapeople (like the same number of people as bytes on your DIMM board a few years ago) is a direct result of such government action. "Oh," you'll say, "that was an evil government starving people deliberately." Yes, but if it weren't for the Holy Principal of Central Control, it couldn't have happened.
Ayn Rand, whom you mention, also said the reason such systems fail is because they are evil in their nature, and they are evil because they restrict the freedom to pursue your own life as you see fit.
> If that's supposed to "prove" that communism > doesn't work, it was flawed - though I would > speculate a perfect expierement wouldn't work > either. It just bugs me to see people claim > the soviets and chineese tried communism "right" > and failed
Any system that introduces a method for the power hungry to seize control over my life is not a "right" system, no matter how you slice it.
The most rabid socialist who looks warmly to communism is, of course, free to believe all capitalists are vile, greedy, selfish pigs. Given that cynical view of the nature of people, that given the opportunity, they would be that way, why in god's name would you give that power, and much more, to, and only to, the government?
"Freedom" is not freedom when you cannot survive without the forced intervention of others, and most certainly not when your economics, which is to say, your method of survival, is dictated at the point of a gun.
You are not free if you are forced to join someone's "good plan for how We Shall Live".
Slashdot Mirror
> How the hell could he know that we are "very
> close" to discovering anything?
I could have sworn I read an article over a year ago where an Earth-type planet was found.
> Do you implement an efficient sorting
> algorithm? No. You type in the quickest thing
> possible to get the job done.
Exactly! That's why you'd program selection sort or extraction sort instead of bubble sort.
Hell, I don't even remember any of them exactly. I'd write a double loop that pulled the highest key out on each decreasing n value. Which one was that now?
OMG did I have a problem with qsort once.
.cpp file. Thus the C function in the .cpp file was C++ call stack oriented, and the callback from qsort choked.
About 10 years ago when C++ was still fairly new, I had a project at grad school where I had to sort something. The compiler compiled but the program crashed. I checked and checked and checked, but there was nothing wrong with my program.
Not one damned thing.
It turns out the qsort was a C library, but I was calling it from a
The compiler was too stupid to recognize this for some reason.
It's several incidents like that that have made me a brutish, hulking figure who swears, drinks beer, and loathes "God" the way Mark Twain used to.
I've always found selection sort to be easier to program and understand than bubble sort.
You are right, though, about time not being much of an issue anymore. Why even bother with linked lists when you can just load all the stuff into a giant array? For $200 you can get a Gig of RAM.
I've even used gigantic arrays for database storage in a CE device. They are, after all, identical to a random access file of fixed record size, one of the cornerstones of computer science as data processing.
Actually, since you have to run through all the items to make sure they're sorted, you can't do better than O(n).
Even where the cardinal value of the keys are the ordinal value in the sort (e.g. key translates directly to position in an array), you're still at O(n).
Besides, I can define a faster lightning sort as long as you rely on side effects rather than on return value.
#define lightning_Flash_wins_over_Superman_sort(x)
That's the old Barry Allen flash, by the way.
Actually, there are other N2 sort algorithms that are better than bubble sort, so you wouldn't even use that on the small arrays at the end of quicksort.
As a TA once told my class, "Don't use bubble sort. It's dumb."
It is, though, not the worst sorting method. The worst was permutation sort, where you permuted the items, checked if they were sorted, then permuted them again and again until they were sorted.
> It's hard to beleive that the revenue from
> domain owners they manage to trick is worth more
> than the damage to their brand.
It reminds me of a scam used against high school students. When I was in HS some, shit, damnit, almost 20 years ago, I got a letter as a senior about how my senior class photo session was scheduled at so and so a time.
Problem was, it wasn't by the "official" company. You could, of course, as a senior have some other company take your photograph, but this company sent out official looking letters to make you think they were the one. Quite smarmy, and I would have fallen for it had not a friend pointed that out. (Not that I had any loyalty to the company that was the official school photographer. For your senior pics you go to the studio anyway, not the school library.)
Actually, the slo-mo film I saw on National Geographic twenty years ago showed cats whipped their tail around to right themselves, and could do so quite nicely from a distance of a foot or so, thank you very much.
Last time I checked, a foot was a lot less than a few stories.
Secondly, animals are not perfect. My wife's cats konk their heads, bodies, whatever, on things all the time. A cat would be far more likely to survive a 2 story drop than a 23 story one. A cat's terminal velocity would probably not be reached in only 23 stories (someone can run the numbers), but in any event, their bodies are big enough, which is to say, massive enough to crack and burst organs on impact.
What the hell are these people thinking? A cat twirls its tail to make sure it lands on its feet. I saw this on National Geographic or something twenty years ago, in slo-mo.
Which side lands down has nothing to do with center of gravity (directly) and everything to do with air resistance on various parts of the object (which force the object to turn, subject to rotational inertia about the center of gravity in that plane.)
Why buttered bread lands butter-down has more to do with the number of rotations on average when tumbling off a counter or hand. One half rotation = butter down, one = bread, one and a half = butter, and so on. You can see statistically how the butter/jelly side will win out most of the time.
That explanation I made up, it's obvious to me mathematically, but I've learned that things obvious to me aren't to others, so have fun. Someone go write a paper and quote me, thanks for asking.
> Perhaps the Antichrist will put in an appearence.
Given that the current Christ/God sits up there, infinitely powerful, as children are raped and tortured and murdered, and still calls Himself "good", I don't see how the Antichrist would be anything but a blessing.
Remember that Yaweh is the fuckhead who, knowingly, gave us intelligence, i.e. knowledge of good and evil, then cast us out.
For you cannot overcome the brute fact that, while it may be in the nature of an infinitely powerful and good being to create self-aware beings, it does not follow you put them in a universe where they can torture and murder each other. Sit and judge with me: that god is fucked up.
Good, I knew you could.
I'm in my mid 30's and never saw any comets in my life, then wham! Hale-Bopp and Hayukataki (?)
Very cool indeed.
I bought a new house whose address was "368". The sales lady told me a Chinese couple would be jealous because having an address whose digits are increasing is lucky.
Speaking of different names, there were tons of clones, too.
Ahh, the memories:
Megaroids -- Would not run on my new Mac Plus from the Umich computer kickoff, while it would run on everyone else's. None of their diagnostic programs could find a problem.
Hemiroids -- A joke name, the game consisted of 3-D prerendered Hemi-asteroids, or asteroids cut in half. Beyond the name, the game was one of the better implementations.
Nerd: I just kicked Thresh's ass in Quake!
Fratboy: I just had sex with my girlfriend.
Nerd: Damn!
The only game I ever mastered enough to play indefinitely was Mystic Marathon. I actually just gave up and went home after a couple of hours.
> You can view this DNA computer
Finally a way to merge Natalie Portman and Beowulf Clusters.
"Austin, the cold war's over"
"Well, finally those capitalist pigs will pay for their crimes, eh comrades, eh"
"Austin, we won"
"Oh groovy, smashing. Yay capitalism"
I told you guys once and I'll tell you again.
Typical Dragonball Z episode:
Overpowered bad guy threatens to kill good guy sidekicks.
Best good guy sidekick starts grunting for twenty minutes to build up power. Overpowered bad guy floats there doing nothing. Splice in B story about Goku being somewhere for some reason.
Good guy sidekick shoots bad guy, with varying degrees of success, mostly bad. Bad guy coughs, spits out something about his eye sensor not detecting such power, but that it was not good enough!
Good guy sidekicks despair, then, tune in next episode!
Calahan: I know what you're thinking, punk. You're thinking, did he fire one hundred forty four shots or only one hundred forty three? Well to tell you the truth, I forgot myself in all this excitement. But being as this is a 144 Magnum, the most powerful rubberbandgun in the world and will blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself a question: "Do I feel lucky?" Well do ya...punk?
This is a threat to those countries that make nuclear weapons, suitcase or otherwise, that if one gets into a US city by way of black market and Al Queyda, taking out the source, i.e. China or the former USSR, of those weapons is still an option "on the table".
It is wrenching the arm behind the back of these countries to get them to help us track every single one of those possible weapons.
Think about it:
- Create shadow government "just in case"
- Float trial balloons to scare the public
- Finally, issue threat
It will help focus the concentration of these governments who say "You know, it may or may not have been sold on the black market, we're not too sure where it is." Help focus the concentration wonderfully.
Arguably the most important thing that didn't happen was that ancient Greece never thought to use its simple toy steam engines to do real work. Had they, people would have been on the moon almost 2 kiloyears ago, and we would be living in some far-future world where life was indefinitely long, all technological problems were solved, and there was nothing to do but temporarily wipe your mind and live in a virtual reality world of some relatively ancient times...
...nevermind. Move along now. Nothing to see here. Go back to posting about "hot, relevant topics" and watching The Man Show, and getting bent out of shape over elections and wars.
Hehe, we should outlaw private sex and force everyone to use prostitutes so that Vito, I mean the government, can get it's cut.
> How is a system fair and free when 80%+ of the
> SU wealth is held by less than 10% of the
> population?
How is that wrong? That is nothing more than a meaningless rhetorical tool used to stir up the masses against a meaningless and nonexistant "problem".
It's fair because it's free. It's free because it's the result of freedom, the freedom to pursue your own life. The phantom statistic is meaningless. To see what happens when 100% is owned by the common man, just look to the broken, retrograde economies of pre-freedom eastern Europe.
> How can you defend the holders of that wealth
> who obviously are not doing their part to help
> those less fortunate?
Last time I checked, they were paying a hell of a lot more in taxes each year than you probably would earn in a lifetime.
Even labeling the poor as "less fortunate" is a misnomer. Given that, in a free country, life is what you make of it, giving them that name is rhetoric to smear over any lack of responsibility that may exist.
> Saying Communism doesn't work because the last
> time it was tried it failed is like saying that
> Computers/Internet/Biotech are a bad idea
> because the companies that started originally
> are mostly in bad shape or bankrupt.
Tens of millions, many tens of millions, died under communism because of communism's primary feature -- "the people" were not free to pursue their own economic agendas. Yes, it turns out, it does matter that people follow their own agendas for survival. The starvation of those 10's of megapeople (like the same number of people as bytes on your DIMM board a few years ago) is a direct result of such government action. "Oh," you'll say, "that was an evil government starving people deliberately." Yes, but if it weren't for the Holy Principal of Central Control, it couldn't have happened.
Ayn Rand, whom you mention, also said the reason such systems fail is because they are evil in their nature, and they are evil because they restrict the freedom to pursue your own life as you see fit.
> If that's supposed to "prove" that communism
> doesn't work, it was flawed - though I would
> speculate a perfect expierement wouldn't work
> either. It just bugs me to see people claim
> the soviets and chineese tried communism "right"
> and failed
Any system that introduces a method for the power hungry to seize control over my life is not a "right" system, no matter how you slice it.
The most rabid socialist who looks warmly to communism is, of course, free to believe all capitalists are vile, greedy, selfish pigs. Given that cynical view of the nature of people, that given the opportunity, they would be that way, why in god's name would you give that power, and much more, to, and only to, the government?
"Freedom" is not freedom when you cannot survive without the forced intervention of others, and most certainly not when your economics, which is to say, your method of survival, is dictated at the point of a gun.
You are not free if you are forced to join someone's "good plan for how We Shall Live".