Yup. It's the Kahan summation algorithm. It works as you describe it and it used to compensate the error that happens when doing very big sums of very small numbers
Ah yes. It's a very useful algorithm, although you only touch on the second stage of dealing with the error, which is the usage of the algorithm in compensating for the error.
There is a first, less commonly mentioned stage that the algorithm helps with, which is dealing with the frustration on encountering the error in the first place.
What every Mars Lander story needs is a justification for this...uh..lunacy.
...
And yet somehow what every Mars Lander story ends up with is some fucking pathetic, overly long comment about how we're wasting our time and how the money should be spent elsewhere from some self-important, completely out of touch windbag who believes that the things that we should be pursuing in life are utterly pointless five minute flash-in-the-pan adrenaline events done purely for brief personal entertainment.
Anyway, back to more interesting discussions elsewhere on the page...
Milk in the United States has been fortified with vitamin D3 (the natural form made through sunlight) since the 1940. This was mandated and reduced the incidence rate of juvenile rickets by 85% in the United States.
Ah yes, I do miss those times in the late 30s, when me and Bill used to go down to the old school yard at lunch time with a pipe and just sit back and listen to the rickets.
I often heard them at night as well, never could quite work out where the bastards were though.
Yeah, but "Astronomers find mystery voorwerp" makes no contextual sense whatsoever, so we'll take what we can get, stilted or otherwise.
It sounds like someone whose been kicked in the beans as they approached the business end of the sentence, and it reads like it's actually an english word printed backwards, until you stare at it long enough to imagine it backwards and realise it makes just as much sense backwards as it does forwards.
Trees do have quite a long lifespan you know, much longer than humans.
A tree in general has more than enough time time in its life to :
- heat up to 70C and burn all its leaves off,
- cool down to 70F and grow them all back again,
- complete 70 various degrees ranging from "Bachelor of the justification of stealing someone elses wifi" all the way to "Masters in the creation of piss-poor wifi analogies", during which time it likely met a lot of/.ers
- run out of lame 70 degrees jokes to make because after the three obvious ones everyone starting converting 70 to every other fucking useless unit under the sun
shortly before one distasterous day, leaning over to a 70 degree angle to shit in the woods before accidentally but silently falling down to it's death, at which point you can count the rings to show that oh wow I can't believe you read this far I am so fucking bored.
It always amazes me that the apparent answer to DRM is simply to pirate it instead. People talk about purchasing a product, getting pissed off at the DRM hassles, then seeking out cracks, and eventually get to the point where they remove those first two steps and replace with "download ISO". And the cycle continues.
It's all a bit of a slippery slope, thats for sure. I think the big issue here is looking at how the DRM came into being in the first place. I'm not convinced it's any sort of chicken and egg scenario, as suggested elsewhere. In the beginning, games were created. People pirated games. These game piracy events, which may not have necessarily reduced sales, gave the impression of reducing sales, which was enough. From there, copy protection was created. But early ones were very simply to get around in most cases, and piracy continued. So copy protection got worse. And so on.
I'm confused as to how people can think that the whole "I was never going to buy it anyway" logic could convince anyone. While, yes, it may be the case that you were never going to make the purchase, the fact that you've downloaded a pirated copy appears to be nothing more than a lost sale regardless of how you paint it. Publishers see that a game sold X, they see that it was pirated about Y, and they believe it could have sold X+Y because that many people were clearly interested in playing it, and at least Y had the ability to get it without paying for it, and chose that option, and their next step is to attempt to remove that option. Someone answer me this; if a game sold X, and was pirated ZERO times, do you honestly think that a publisher would want to implement some sort of copy protection in order to try and secure more sales? Who could honestly believe that a copy protection system would come into place naturally if no-one was actually pirating the software in the first place?
I fully appreciate that some peoples opinion is that not supporting DRM-laden products is merely telling the publishers that "We hate DRM and really don't appreciate being screwed over with your moronic copy protection that doesn't work", when in actual fact I imagine it tells them something more like "We don't like the game that you have published from this developer. Either you need to ditch them out on the street or get them creating something much more generic, and if possible, based on a movie that came out 6 months ago"
Publishers don't connect reduction in sales with increased copy protection; who could possibly think that is the case? These are accountants and penny pushers for the most part at the publisher level; cold hard sales numbers are a reflection on nothing more than the quality of the game and the value of the developer. Once in a while someone will let slip about yet another increment in the increasingly painful copy protection that is shipping with a soon to be released game, the internet screams blue murder, and the publisher eventually backs down. I can just imagine what some poor developer has to go through trying to explain to some suit how the copy protection is apparently going to cost them sales, when they're only implementing it in the first place to try and ensure more. Then the game gets released and pirated again just like before, and the publisher just makes sure it keeps a lid on the copy protection used in the next game so people don't know until release.
Your idea of purchasing a game and then downloading a crack had merit maybe 5+ years ago, back when publishers who once were merely trying to increase sales and get them back to what they assumed was their rightful levels with all those "lost sales to piracy". If piracy levels were virtually zero, but game crack downloads were at an all time high, publishers wouldn't care, and would be more likely to not bother with any more 'advances' in copy protection, thinking that the job was done, and the developers get to eat. But the slipperly slope has gone too far. They now realise that DRM can be used to make som
Is this Ebay going down the tube with the increasingly odd stupid business practices or is it that the Ebay signal/noise ratio is now so bad that it's incredibly hard to find something worth buying in all the "1000 PC GAMES ON 1 DVD!!! RARE!!!", and millions of identical copies of either brand new or failed overstock game auctions that clog the system. Or maybe a combination of both.
I can't be the only nerd depressed by this. I constantly search Ebay for older PC DOS titles (just lately I've been hunting down boxed copies of Quarantine 1 and 2) and it's got to the point where I don't know if it's worth the hassle because there just isn't anything there anymore.
Ebay no more than a few years ago used to be filled with older PC titles; I used to have to decide which boxed copy of Daggerfall I wanted to bid on, nowadays I only get the priviledge of bidding on a CD that contains patches to run Daggerfall on XP.
You're close to the correct reasoning. What has actually happened here is that the black hole in question has simply had wave after wave of matter thrown at it until it hit it's preset kill limit.
Once that occurs, the black hole shuts down and it's simply a matter of time until it evaporates into nothing.
I believe the final thing that appeared to enter the hole and allow it to reach it's kill limit was a space cruise ship, Tita-something or other. Closely followed by an upper-class-looking golden robot. I think it was a chick.
Slashdot Mirror
C'mon, man. This is a Duke Nukem article.
You obviously saw flying pigcops.
banning homosexual behavior could possibly be explained away as a desire to preserve evolutionary diversity
WRONG AGAIN POINDEXTER.
Homosexual behaviour is banned because, lets face it, it's pretty gay.
"Exercisers learn faster, remember more, think clearer and bounce back more easily from brain injuries such as a stroke."
Strokes caused by doing stuff like exercising too much.
Yup. It's the Kahan summation algorithm. It works as you describe it and it used to compensate the error that happens when doing very big sums of very small numbers
Ah yes. It's a very useful algorithm, although you only touch on the second stage of dealing with the error, which is the usage of the algorithm in compensating for the error.
There is a first, less commonly mentioned stage that the algorithm helps with, which is dealing with the frustration on encountering the error in the first place.
You can yell out KAHAAAAAAAAAAAN.
Okay, I'm done.
The name's Charles. Charles McFuckelstein.
My friends call me Chuckles.
Yeah, I did a typo, dammit.
I'll never actually forget those numbers.
I can see it now.
"Hey that's an awesome color scheme, how do I do that?"
"It's easy, just enter in 'SYS 64728'"
"Hey sweet, thanks for tha... HEY YOU JERK WHAT THE HELL, oh wait nevermind I'm back on now anyway"
They are probably just jealous Speccy owners still bitter to the very end about making the wrong PC choice in the 80s, it's completely understandable.
The former has seriously harmed the average Mexican ...
Not a problem since, by definition, most Mexicans will fall either side of the definition of an 'average' Mexican, whatever that is.
And besides, the removal of any 'average' Mexicans won't affect the overall average of any one Mexican, so really, I don't see a problem here.
I won't be impressed until they shell out for Dennis Quaid and Martin Short to be voice actors.
Yes yes, whatever. Quit talking to me, I'm embarassed to be in anyway connected to you and I got off your lawn ages ago.
This is a non-issue.
Um, this is actually a re-issue
SRSLY FFS, RTFA or GTFO
What every Mars Lander story needs is a justification for this...uh..lunacy.
...
...
And yet somehow what every Mars Lander story ends up with is some fucking pathetic, overly long comment about how we're wasting our time and how the money should be spent elsewhere from some self-important, completely out of touch windbag who believes that the things that we should be pursuing in life are utterly pointless five minute flash-in-the-pan adrenaline events done purely for brief personal entertainment.
Anyway, back to more interesting discussions elsewhere on the page
Milk in the United States has been fortified with vitamin D3 (the natural form made through sunlight) since the 1940. This was mandated and reduced the incidence rate of juvenile rickets by 85% in the United States.
Ah yes, I do miss those times in the late 30s, when me and Bill used to go down to the old school yard at lunch time with a pipe and just sit back and listen to the rickets.
I often heard them at night as well, never could quite work out where the bastards were though.
Yes, but if you're "white enough to afford all three consoles"*, would you ever get time enough to go outside and take advantage of your whiteness?
*with respect to Yahtzee
Yeah, but "Astronomers find mystery voorwerp" makes no contextual sense whatsoever, so we'll take what we can get, stilted or otherwise.
It sounds like someone whose been kicked in the beans as they approached the business end of the sentence, and it reads like it's actually an english word printed backwards, until you stare at it long enough to imagine it backwards and realise it makes just as much sense backwards as it does forwards.
Also, WINDMILLS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY.
Trees do have quite a long lifespan you know, much longer than humans.
A tree in general has more than enough time time in its life to :
- heat up to 70C and burn all its leaves off,
- cool down to 70F and grow them all back again,
- complete 70 various degrees ranging from "Bachelor of the justification of stealing someone elses wifi" all the way to "Masters in the creation of piss-poor wifi analogies", during which time it likely met a lot of /.ers
- run out of lame 70 degrees jokes to make because after the three obvious ones everyone starting converting 70 to every other fucking useless unit under the sun
shortly before one distasterous day, leaning over to a 70 degree angle to shit in the woods before accidentally but silently falling down to it's death, at which point you can count the rings to show that oh wow I can't believe you read this far I am so fucking bored.
Never mind rotation, a tree at 70 degrees is in great danger of falling over.
Not that anyone would hear it, mind you.
None of these are funny.
You people need to make like trees, and shit in the woods.
It always amazes me that the apparent answer to DRM is simply to pirate it instead. People talk about purchasing a product, getting pissed off at the DRM hassles, then seeking out cracks, and eventually get to the point where they remove those first two steps and replace with "download ISO". And the cycle continues.
It's all a bit of a slippery slope, thats for sure. I think the big issue here is looking at how the DRM came into being in the first place. I'm not convinced it's any sort of chicken and egg scenario, as suggested elsewhere. In the beginning, games were created. People pirated games. These game piracy events, which may not have necessarily reduced sales, gave the impression of reducing sales, which was enough. From there, copy protection was created. But early ones were very simply to get around in most cases, and piracy continued. So copy protection got worse. And so on.
I'm confused as to how people can think that the whole "I was never going to buy it anyway" logic could convince anyone. While, yes, it may be the case that you were never going to make the purchase, the fact that you've downloaded a pirated copy appears to be nothing more than a lost sale regardless of how you paint it. Publishers see that a game sold X, they see that it was pirated about Y, and they believe it could have sold X+Y because that many people were clearly interested in playing it, and at least Y had the ability to get it without paying for it, and chose that option, and their next step is to attempt to remove that option. Someone answer me this; if a game sold X, and was pirated ZERO times, do you honestly think that a publisher would want to implement some sort of copy protection in order to try and secure more sales? Who could honestly believe that a copy protection system would come into place naturally if no-one was actually pirating the software in the first place?
I fully appreciate that some peoples opinion is that not supporting DRM-laden products is merely telling the publishers that "We hate DRM and really don't appreciate being screwed over with your moronic copy protection that doesn't work", when in actual fact I imagine it tells them something more like "We don't like the game that you have published from this developer. Either you need to ditch them out on the street or get them creating something much more generic, and if possible, based on a movie that came out 6 months ago"
Publishers don't connect reduction in sales with increased copy protection; who could possibly think that is the case? These are accountants and penny pushers for the most part at the publisher level; cold hard sales numbers are a reflection on nothing more than the quality of the game and the value of the developer. Once in a while someone will let slip about yet another increment in the increasingly painful copy protection that is shipping with a soon to be released game, the internet screams blue murder, and the publisher eventually backs down. I can just imagine what some poor developer has to go through trying to explain to some suit how the copy protection is apparently going to cost them sales, when they're only implementing it in the first place to try and ensure more. Then the game gets released and pirated again just like before, and the publisher just makes sure it keeps a lid on the copy protection used in the next game so people don't know until release.
Your idea of purchasing a game and then downloading a crack had merit maybe 5+ years ago, back when publishers who once were merely trying to increase sales and get them back to what they assumed was their rightful levels with all those "lost sales to piracy". If piracy levels were virtually zero, but game crack downloads were at an all time high, publishers wouldn't care, and would be more likely to not bother with any more 'advances' in copy protection, thinking that the job was done, and the developers get to eat. But the slipperly slope has gone too far. They now realise that DRM can be used to make som
Why does everyone automatically assume that I know those two?
(Also, I like to fart in the tub.)
Is this Ebay going down the tube with the increasingly odd stupid business practices or is it that the Ebay signal/noise ratio is now so bad that it's incredibly hard to find something worth buying in all the "1000 PC GAMES ON 1 DVD!!! RARE!!!", and millions of identical copies of either brand new or failed overstock game auctions that clog the system. Or maybe a combination of both. I can't be the only nerd depressed by this. I constantly search Ebay for older PC DOS titles (just lately I've been hunting down boxed copies of Quarantine 1 and 2) and it's got to the point where I don't know if it's worth the hassle because there just isn't anything there anymore. Ebay no more than a few years ago used to be filled with older PC titles; I used to have to decide which boxed copy of Daggerfall I wanted to bid on, nowadays I only get the priviledge of bidding on a CD that contains patches to run Daggerfall on XP.
There would be so much more research into this, if it weren't for the fact that they don't pay so well ...
You're close to the correct reasoning. What has actually happened here is that the black hole in question has simply had wave after wave of matter thrown at it until it hit it's preset kill limit.
Once that occurs, the black hole shuts down and it's simply a matter of time until it evaporates into nothing.
I believe the final thing that appeared to enter the hole and allow it to reach it's kill limit was a space cruise ship, Tita-something or other. Closely followed by an upper-class-looking golden robot. I think it was a chick.
What the hell is the person that modded this a troll even doing in this article?
This is not a troll, unless you have no geek cred whatsoever. It's a small segment from one of the best sci-fi short stories you'll read.
I'm as anti-religion as the next nerd, but just because a post mentions a god, you can't immediately presume it to be trolling.
Besides, it's a science-fiction article, if there was ever going to be a perfectly suitable place to make reference to gods, it's here.