Learning computers is in many ways like learning a language. It can be done easily at a young age, and with great effort at an older age. I'm wondering if he's not seen the generation of wonderkids coming up these days that know better how to use the computer at age 7 than their parents do.
So keep your ludditism away from my kids (when I have them). We're raising a new generation that are savants at using computers compared to us.
MMORPG hacks
on
Gaming Hacks
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I haven't RTFB but if this review is any indication, the author skips the more interesting MMORPG hacks out there. Really it sounds like this guy doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground.
Example: in many MMORPG games to date, there exist tools which pilfer the stream of data flowing to your computer and can tell you things you shouldn't know. For example in DAOC, a program existed which gave you a radar-like view of the world around you extending out to twice the distance of the game's normal cutoff distance for viewing players.
Every single person in game within a distance of about 500 feet of you was known to your computer, but your client only shows you on screen people no more than 250 feet away.
Let me tell you that in PVP, having a double-the normal range of detecting enemy players was "great". I could maneuver an entire group of allies past defenses by keeping outside of enemy view and then ambush them from behind. Further I'd know exactly when to retreat as the reinforcements arrived.
That was a true MMORPG hack in every sense of the word (it was written for Linux, ran in X11 and sniffed the packet stream). There was even a back-n-forth encryption war in which Mythic kept changing the encryption protocol, and the author would then recrack it within days.
The same utility existed in EQ, I'm sure it exists in UO, and in Asheron's Call there are dozens of great utility programs written that let you detect anyone within about a mile, and apply a set of filters to them, alerting you if they are enemies, what their level is, giving you the ability to target them.
For a book to talk about game hacks and MMORPG's and not devote several chapters to these tools... well it's clear that the author doesn't really know his own craft and is trying to make a fast buck on a good concept.
if you want to complain about lost profits, STOP BRIBING CONGRESS AND LAWMAKERS! there, that'll save you more money than yelling at pimple-faced teenagers
Actually bribing congressmen is cheaaaap. They're having a firesale on laws, everything must go!
Last time I read the reports of cash contributions to senators I was alarmed at how little money it took to buy yourself a DMCA. I think it's in the neighborhood of several million clams.
More like Y = lazy implementations of flow control.
A for-loop, with all kinds of branches and conditional statements, when properly implemented in MATLAB, will be blazingly fast.
I'm betting that most people trying it for the first time throw something together to test it out, break practically every vectorization rule, see some appalling speed, and write off matlab without a second glance.
Nanotube fiber is in production not some pie in the sky idea. If you read the other +5 posts here you'll hear about SWT that we can produce *right now* that' strong enough for a conventional elevator. it's just too expensive, but they're working on that.
If you actually read this guy's work, he admits a huge problem with this approach. An Equatorial elevator has zero theoretical force applied to the base, this one would have immense pressure trying to tear it from the mooring brackets and pull it to the equator.
As such the cable needs to be thicker, and the thicker the cable, the more the force, etc etc
We'd likely need another revolution in materials technology over and above nanotech for this to even be possible, and it's still vulnerable to breakdown/sabotage, as a snapping off at the moor would be disastrous (as opposed to an Eq Elevator in which case the moor is largely a moot point when loads aren't actively climbing)
And because he hasn't used real constants he has no numbers to give us. You can't base any serious theoretical ideas on this guys work, for all we know the force of the pull is ludicrously huge.
So don't pin your hopes on this.
in his words: In my opinion, the main drawback with the off-center elevator is that there is a huge tension on the anchor point. This means that the cable will have to be heavier. Also, it means that a way has to be found to get the anchor setup. When building an equatorial elevator, there is no need for a force from the anchor point, so the elevator can simply be extended up and down until it reaches the ground. The off-equator elevator needs a force from the ground to stay off equator, so that strategy won't work. The only idea I can think of is to make an equatorial elevator, and then move the anchor point to the desired position. I am not sure how hard pulling the elevator into place would be, because I did not do the simulation with real numbers.
My argument is that programmers working on maths projects tend to prefer programming languages,
That's hardly surprising given that Matlab's recent advances in code optimization are about 2 years old. It takes a good decade for an entire field to switch over to something new.
I'd counter that if you need to understand your implementation that deeply and hand-optimise the code to use an efficient feature set, you've already lost most of the benefits of working with a tool like Matlab and might as well use a real programming language anyway.
You only have to do this for the portions of your code that are computationally intensive. When you're done with that, you get to enjoy the large part of MATLAB's visualization techniques which will blow the doors off anything you can knock together in C.
Note, obviously you can do anything in C that you can do in matlab, but the ease of these things in matlab means you can cut down the time it takes to explore a large dataset interactively by an order of magnitude. You can put up arbitrarily complex visualizations in 1 2 or 3 dimensions with a single line of code into an interactive shell. The effeciency this provides to a data analysis is mind blowing. To match it in C or Fortran, you'd basically end up rewriting most of Matlab's visualization tools.
And of course if you really can't wrap your head around vectorizing your code so that matlab can run it fast, just call your C routines and then enjoy matlab's visualization for all the rest of your data analysis.
There's absolutely no disadvantage to Matlab once you know how to use it properly. But as ever, it takes time for entrenched disciplines to change their techniques. The fact that Matlab isn't used everywhere only means it hasn't been around long enough.
But the fact that it's gained an enormous foothold across a great tract of the scientific community in just a few short years speaks volumes to its effectiveness.
You don't understand matlab, it runs slowly only because your coders don't know the features of Matlab that they must stay away from.
Think of it like this:
C lets you do X, very fast. Matlab lets you do X very fast, and Y fairly slowly.
Inclusion of any elements of Y into a predominantly X piece of code will bring the whole lot down to Y speed.
There's no inherent advantage of C (as far as I can tell and I've got years of experience in both), it's just that people tend to roll X and Y together in a Matlab program.
Admittedly, this is the fault of Matlab, in letting you do this without warnings, but there is documentation provided that tells you what the set of Y is and gives some hints for recoding bits of Y as X.
So basically, people who program in C are denying themselves the joys of MATLAB's high-level functionality, and in return are still having to code everything in terms of X.
I have given up on C completely, if I can't write it in MATLAB and have it run fast, it means I don't understand the algorithm well enough and should get back to the drawing board.
Btw, your attempt to divide programming into categories of "serious" and not is laughable.
Actually, I do "serious" science (the GP is ridiculous) and there are remarkably few loops that you can't get matlab to zoom through once you learn what kinds of things tend to cause MATLAB to slow down and tricks to get around them.
For example, everything big has to be pre-allocated. If you're creating an array of X million items on the fly, pre-allocated it to huge a size with zeroes and then pare it down afterwards. Obviously if you ask matlab to re-malloc its array every time you add something to it, the code is going to be tragically slow.
Also, I've noticed that if you can avoid reading elements of an array that you are putting numbers into, it can treat that array more quickly.
I'm still a bit skeptical of this analysis. It may be the type of thing which doesn't lend itself well to T-tests, or that search engines are complicated enough that butterfly effects cause massive statistical differences for no real reason.
For example, from yourr data I find that relative to Google, Yahoo is weighted in favor of apache by 66% to 64% and that's also highly significant at 10 ^ -13.
I haven't checked Teoma's difference of 68% to 64% but I'm sure there's a p even more astronomical there.
So if we believe your analysis, that MSN is weighted in favor of IIS is no bigger news than that Yahoo is weighted in favor of Apache (assuming Google is some kind of gold standard).
Point being, these data need to be approached with some caution. It could be that any given search engine has a huge chance of being statistically significantly different from every other engine.
If that's true, then the chance that MSN is statistically in favor of IIS is..... 50% ie a Flip of the coin.
First, anytime you see P 10^-24 for a sample of only 1000 and means differing by 3% you should be suspicious immediately.
And 969 degrees of freedom?!
Buddy, your stats are waaaaay off. There is just 1 DF in this data.
My guess is that you tried to feed categorical data to a t-test thing and it barfed (as it should), so you fiddled with it until it claimed to produce a successful result (by somehow misinterpreting each of the 970 observations as a degree of freedom) and now you've got P 10^24, which is lunacy.
Assuming these errors are uniformly distributed, there are roughly equal numbers of errors in the positive and negative directions. The idea that such money is just vanishing from our economy is flat out wrong.
And even if the errors are heavily biased in one direction, the money is still somewhere, it's just being less efficiently distributed.
If I'm contemplating whether I want to get to know someone, I lend'em firefly and ask them what they thought of it.
It's as good a personality test as I've ever found.
Re:Exactly how many tax dollars did I pay for this
on
The Space Shuttle Returns
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
PR is absolutely mission critical work for NASA.
If they lose public support, they lose funding, it's as simple as that.
If this web package was purchased for even as much as 1 million dollars, it was money well spent, possibly one of the most important line items in their budget.
Using Scott Bakula, while of debatable wisdom to those of us who hated Enterprise, shows astounding good sense on the part of someone at NASA. We can debate about whether Shatner or Stewart would have been better, but at least they're in the right ballpark.
But the site looks sharp, it's informative to a lay-person, and tries to make the shuttle program seem real in viewer's minds.
The only gripe I have is the CPU hit for playing the video. What codec is that?
disclaimer: I think the shuttle should be scrapped and we then return to capsule based launches which were cheaper and safer even with 60's technology.
Except for the fact that they get it wrong. There should be no difference in the comp sci program and the math program for the first two years.
Comp Sci is a diverse discipline. While it may be true that math plays a huge role in your specific type of work, it's a mistake to force that model on everyone. Large scale software engineering projects have very little to do with mathematics.
The tight collusion between math and CS only pertains to a limited domain of theoretical work. One can learn the math needs in just a few courses.
I'm not an expert on this by any means, but from what I know of physiology:
There's nothing intrinsically harmful about low temperatures to body temperature, apart from the fact that the heart and lungs can stop working. (assuming you're above freezing!). If they've figured out a way to keep these things going, that should be sufficient. Given that many other mammals can hibernate, the innate mechanisms to survive this type of behaviour are probably inside of us somewhere.
The important things to keep going are enough blood and oxygen to power your cells' ability to stay alive, and your immune system has to stay on its toes to prevent infection/rot.
But just as in the case of computer CPU's, if you're not doing much, you won't be burning much energy, or using much oxygen, so heart and lung function can decrease drastically and still keep everything alive.
Surely they aren't referring to German concrete structures in WWII? Yea they looked ugly as hell but just you try to get rid of 5 foot thick rebar concrete in a dome shape.
Slashdot Mirror
The parent is out of touch with reality.
Learning computers is in many ways like learning a language. It can be done easily at a young age, and with great effort at an older age. I'm wondering if he's not seen the generation of wonderkids coming up these days that know better how to use the computer at age 7 than their parents do.
So keep your ludditism away from my kids (when I have them). We're raising a new generation that are savants at using computers compared to us.
I haven't RTFB but if this review is any indication, the author skips the more interesting MMORPG hacks out there. Really it sounds like this guy doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground.
Example: in many MMORPG games to date, there exist tools which pilfer the stream of data flowing to your computer and can tell you things you shouldn't know. For example in DAOC, a program existed which gave you a radar-like view of the world around you extending out to twice the distance of the game's normal cutoff distance for viewing players.
Every single person in game within a distance of about 500 feet of you was known to your computer, but your client only shows you on screen people no more than 250 feet away.
Let me tell you that in PVP, having a double-the normal range of detecting enemy players was "great". I could maneuver an entire group of allies past defenses by keeping outside of enemy view and then ambush them from behind. Further I'd know exactly when to retreat as the reinforcements arrived.
That was a true MMORPG hack in every sense of the word (it was written for Linux, ran in X11 and sniffed the packet stream). There was even a back-n-forth encryption war in which Mythic kept changing the encryption protocol, and the author would then recrack it within days.
The same utility existed in EQ, I'm sure it exists in UO, and in Asheron's Call there are dozens of great utility programs written that let you detect anyone within about a mile, and apply a set of filters to them, alerting you if they are enemies, what their level is, giving you the ability to target them.
For a book to talk about game hacks and MMORPG's and not devote several chapters to these tools... well it's clear that the author doesn't really know his own craft and is trying to make a fast buck on a good concept.
if you want to complain about lost profits, STOP BRIBING CONGRESS AND LAWMAKERS! there, that'll save you more money than yelling at pimple-faced teenagers
Actually bribing congressmen is cheaaaap. They're having a firesale on laws, everything must go!
Last time I read the reports of cash contributions to senators I was alarmed at how little money it took to buy yourself a DMCA. I think it's in the neighborhood of several million clams.
60 is within a gnat's cock of the necessary strength.
It's basically there, just needs some further development.
More like Y = lazy implementations of flow control.
A for-loop, with all kinds of branches and conditional statements, when properly implemented in MATLAB, will be blazingly fast.
I'm betting that most people trying it for the first time throw something together to test it out, break practically every vectorization rule, see some appalling speed, and write off matlab without a second glance.
Nanotube fiber is in production not some pie in the sky idea. If you read the other +5 posts here you'll hear about SWT that we can produce *right now* that' strong enough for a conventional elevator. it's just too expensive, but they're working on that.
If you actually read this guy's work, he admits a huge problem with this approach. An Equatorial elevator has zero theoretical force applied to the base, this one would have immense pressure trying to tear it from the mooring brackets and pull it to the equator.
As such the cable needs to be thicker, and the thicker the cable, the more the force, etc etc
We'd likely need another revolution in materials technology over and above nanotech for this to even be possible, and it's still vulnerable to breakdown/sabotage, as a snapping off at the moor would be disastrous (as opposed to an Eq Elevator in which case the moor is largely a moot point when loads aren't actively climbing)
And because he hasn't used real constants he has no numbers to give us. You can't base any serious theoretical ideas on this guys work, for all we know the force of the pull is ludicrously huge.
So don't pin your hopes on this.
in his words:
In my opinion, the main drawback with the off-center elevator is that there is a huge tension on the anchor point. This means that the cable will have to be heavier. Also, it means that a way has to be found to get the anchor setup. When building an equatorial elevator, there is no need for a force from the anchor point, so the elevator can simply be extended up and down until it reaches the ground. The off-equator elevator needs a force from the ground to stay off equator, so that strategy won't work. The only idea I can think of is to make an equatorial elevator, and then move the anchor point to the desired position. I am not sure how hard pulling the elevator into place would be, because I did not do the simulation with real numbers.
My argument is that programmers working on maths projects tend to prefer programming languages,
That's hardly surprising given that Matlab's recent advances in code optimization are about 2 years old. It takes a good decade for an entire field to switch over to something new.
I'd counter that if you need to understand your implementation that deeply and hand-optimise the code to use an efficient feature set, you've already lost most of the benefits of working with a tool like Matlab and might as well use a real programming language anyway.
You only have to do this for the portions of your code that are computationally intensive. When you're done with that, you get to enjoy the large part of MATLAB's visualization techniques which will blow the doors off anything you can knock together in C.
Note, obviously you can do anything in C that you can do in matlab, but the ease of these things in matlab means you can cut down the time it takes to explore a large dataset interactively by an order of magnitude. You can put up arbitrarily complex visualizations in 1 2 or 3 dimensions with a single line of code into an interactive shell. The effeciency this provides to a data analysis is mind blowing. To match it in C or Fortran, you'd basically end up rewriting most of Matlab's visualization tools.
And of course if you really can't wrap your head around vectorizing your code so that matlab can run it fast, just call your C routines and then enjoy matlab's visualization for all the rest of your data analysis.
There's absolutely no disadvantage to Matlab once you know how to use it properly. But as ever, it takes time for entrenched disciplines to change their techniques. The fact that Matlab isn't used everywhere only means it hasn't been around long enough.
But the fact that it's gained an enormous foothold across a great tract of the scientific community in just a few short years speaks volumes to its effectiveness.
You don't understand matlab, it runs slowly only because your coders don't know the features of Matlab that they must stay away from.
Think of it like this:
C lets you do X, very fast.
Matlab lets you do X very fast, and Y fairly slowly.
Inclusion of any elements of Y into a predominantly X piece of code will bring the whole lot down to Y speed.
There's no inherent advantage of C (as far as I can tell and I've got years of experience in both), it's just that people tend to roll X and Y together in a Matlab program.
Admittedly, this is the fault of Matlab, in letting you do this without warnings, but there is documentation provided that tells you what the set of Y is and gives some hints for recoding bits of Y as X.
So basically, people who program in C are denying themselves the joys of MATLAB's high-level functionality, and in return are still having to code everything in terms of X.
I have given up on C completely, if I can't write it in MATLAB and have it run fast, it means I don't understand the algorithm well enough and should get back to the drawing board.
Btw, your attempt to divide programming into categories of "serious" and not is laughable.
Actually, I do "serious" science (the GP is ridiculous) and there are remarkably few loops that you can't get matlab to zoom through once you learn what kinds of things tend to cause MATLAB to slow down and tricks to get around them.
For example, everything big has to be pre-allocated. If you're creating an array of X million items on the fly, pre-allocated it to huge a size with zeroes and then pare it down afterwards. Obviously if you ask matlab to re-malloc its array every time you add something to it, the code is going to be tragically slow.
Also, I've noticed that if you can avoid reading elements of an array that you are putting numbers into, it can treat that array more quickly.
It's not like the shuttle's gonna blow up or anything.
Jeez...
I'm still a bit skeptical of this analysis. It may be the type of thing which doesn't lend itself well to T-tests, or that search engines are complicated enough that butterfly effects cause massive statistical differences for no real reason.
For example, from yourr data I find that relative to Google, Yahoo is weighted in favor of apache by 66% to 64% and that's also highly significant at 10 ^ -13.
I haven't checked Teoma's difference of 68% to 64% but I'm sure there's a p even more astronomical there.
So if we believe your analysis, that MSN is weighted in favor of IIS is no bigger news than that Yahoo is weighted in favor of Apache (assuming Google is some kind of gold standard).
Point being, these data need to be approached with some caution. It could be that any given search engine has a huge chance of being statistically significantly different from every other engine.
If that's true, then the chance that MSN is statistically in favor of IIS is..... 50% ie a Flip of the coin.
Mod Me down!
I hadn't read his F'ing Link and thought 1000 were each individual webservers for a particular search term.
He meant 1000 different searches, which is a sensible way to do it.
His stats may be fine.
Slow down a second.
First, anytime you see P 10^-24 for a sample of only 1000 and means differing by 3% you should be suspicious immediately.
And 969 degrees of freedom?!
Buddy, your stats are waaaaay off. There is just 1 DF in this data.
My guess is that you tried to feed categorical data to a t-test thing and it barfed (as it should), so you fiddled with it until it claimed to produce a successful result (by somehow misinterpreting each of the 970 observations as a degree of freedom) and now you've got P 10^24, which is lunacy.
thumbs down on your methodology.
The Earth has finite capacity by definition of the lawys of physics.
But it's mistake to think that improvements in technology can't drastically increase the capacity.
This is money that is "lost" or "gone".
Assuming these errors are uniformly distributed, there are roughly equal numbers of errors in the positive and negative directions. The idea that such money is just vanishing from our economy is flat out wrong.
And even if the errors are heavily biased in one direction, the money is still somewhere, it's just being less efficiently distributed.
If I'm contemplating whether I want to get to know someone, I lend'em firefly and ask them what they thought of it.
It's as good a personality test as I've ever found.
PR is absolutely mission critical work for NASA.
If they lose public support, they lose funding, it's as simple as that.
If this web package was purchased for even as much as 1 million dollars, it was money well spent, possibly one of the most important line items in their budget.
Using Scott Bakula, while of debatable wisdom to those of us who hated Enterprise, shows astounding good sense on the part of someone at NASA. We can debate about whether Shatner or Stewart would have been better, but at least they're in the right ballpark.
But the site looks sharp, it's informative to a lay-person, and tries to make the shuttle program seem real in viewer's minds.
The only gripe I have is the CPU hit for playing the video. What codec is that?
disclaimer: I think the shuttle should be scrapped and we then return to capsule based launches which were cheaper and safer even with 60's technology.
A postage stamp sized video that takes 100% of a 3ghz machine to play.
Well done NASA, you guys rock.
Yes, they are.
But it is not appropriate to fill a math student's mind with all of that.
Yes, O(n^2) vs O(nlogn) is important to know, at a deeply intuitive level.
But it's not that difficult of a thing, and certainly doesn't require two years of math training to get across.
Except for the fact that they get it wrong. There should be no difference in the comp sci program and the math program for the first two years.
Comp Sci is a diverse discipline. While it may be true that math plays a huge role in your specific type of work, it's a mistake to force that model on everyone. Large scale software engineering projects have very little to do with mathematics.
The tight collusion between math and CS only pertains to a limited domain of theoretical work. One can learn the math needs in just a few courses.
Bats would argue that you are wrong:
l ub ke/bats/batstext.html
"During hibernation, the bat's body functions slow down, and its body temperature drops to that of its hibernation site"
http://www.tlgrant.r9esd.k12.or.us/english1/von
I'm not an expert on this by any means, but from what I know of physiology:
There's nothing intrinsically harmful about low temperatures to body temperature, apart from the fact that the heart and lungs can stop working. (assuming you're above freezing!). If they've figured out a way to keep these things going, that should be sufficient. Given that many other mammals can hibernate, the innate mechanisms to survive this type of behaviour are probably inside of us somewhere.
The important things to keep going are enough blood and oxygen to power your cells' ability to stay alive, and your immune system has to stay on its toes to prevent infection/rot.
But just as in the case of computer CPU's, if you're not doing much, you won't be burning much energy, or using much oxygen, so heart and lung function can decrease drastically and still keep everything alive.
I'm wondering why Jerry built means poorly built?
Surely they aren't referring to German concrete structures in WWII? Yea they looked ugly as hell but just you try to get rid of 5 foot thick rebar concrete in a dome shape.