Re:lets do it the hard way 'cause we got computers
on
Programming Puzzles
·
· Score: 1
You're saying that because there are two mutually exclusive properties that the "probability" of each occuring must be 1/2? Not even.
NO, I certainly didn't say that. I said that in this case the two probabilities are 50%. That's clear from the fact that any swap of 2 tiles results in a change of state, and because there is clearly no preference for one state or the other in the original random selection of the 16 tiles (or 15 tiles and a space).
You can confirm this another way. Look at the case of having only 3 tiles in a 4 tile space. computer the perminations and how many of them are solvable (you can do it in your head). The answer is 50%. Enlarge the puzzle, to say 5 tiles in a 2x3 space. The probability doesn't change (if you think it does you would have to justify in which bias (solvable or unsolvable) it changes, and there is no dirrerence in either state). Enlarge it again. And so on, up to a 4x4 puzzle or larger.
So if you want to support your Not even statement, perhaps you can offer your own theory about what the probability is? And do you somehow think it favors solvable or unsolvable?
You know, I found this interesting too. But there's a major problem with it, at least in the way that you presented the way to make it hard for the player. OK, if you swap the other R into the first position the puzzle would be unsolvable.....if the other 13 pieces were unique. But they are not. If the player happens to move the second A (the one that started out in P A L) into place after the R, he will undo the problem you created with the R swap. Indeed, if you really randomized the other letters then he is as likely to move either A into place, so the puzzle is no harder than if you had just randomized everything (actuly slightly easier since you put an R in place for him.
I suspect the real way to set this problem up for a user would be to leave the word RATE on the top line, or at least RAT, but to be sure that you swapped one and only one of the first two tiles when you did this. Or to leave it so very close to that solution that the user would likely make one move and be there (for example a top line of Y R A T and a second line of [space] [something ] [something] R, with the intended incorrect R and A in each position). But the way that you set the problem up just does not work.
Infineon agreed in October to pay a $160 million fine for its role in the conspiracy, according to the Justice Department
This translates into:
Infineon stole so much that they could easily pay a $160 million cut to the government, who wanted their share, even though they did nothing to deserve it. In return they let the company continue to do business as usual, and suggest that they price fix in less obvious ways next time. They also asked the company to offer up a few scape goats, who would get a token amount of time in a federal luxury prison like Camp Cupcake or Club Fed, but would be out in even less time than Martha Stewart. The people who bought the artifically high priced memory get screwed.
pay attention: Infineon agreed in October to pay a $160 million fine for its role in the conspiracy, according to the Justice Department
But yes, it is crazy to let the actual people who did this off with such a slap on the wrist. They ikely will still draw their fat cat pay checks while in prison if they ever do go too!
lets do it the hard way 'cause we got computers
on
Programming Puzzles
·
· Score: 1
The challenge, then is to make a computer program that can compute the probability of a random assemblage of the tiles for solvability.
Some things are just too simple to solve by a program. This is one of them. There are two states that the puzzle can be in, solvable or unsolvable. Any exchange of pieces changes that state. It might seem that there being 15 pieces rather than 16 has some effect on it and complicates things, but it doesn't. You get the exact same problem if you imagine that there are 16 pieces arranged randomly, and then that piece 16 is discarded before the puzzle is attempted to be solved. There is no preference at all for the solvable or unsolvable state when 16 pieces are put in a 4x4 matrix, so therefore there is no preference when 15 pieces and a blank space are put in a 4x4 matrix. So the solution, no matter how complex you make the computer program, will have to be 50%.
The UCE could well be coming from a taken over zombee Or a site where someone got wifi access (either because it's a public site or by a warspammer). Better to send a message to the person who is the source for the spam - they spam or pay others to spam for them, they also run up a high usage charge on their website that does not net them a return.
If a show starts early, like The Simpsons or The West Wing, the network hurts their own customers because many of these customers tune in on the hour and damn well know they have missed something. They might watch the rest, but ill will is bred by the network's act. And if they start a show late, well, channel surfers have little patience for that too. If I've just finished watching something that ran from 8:00 to 9:00, at 9:00 I scan across the dial to find something else to watch. I have a pile of TV guides on the coffee table, but to be honest I haven't opened one in months. If I miss seeing something that I might have watched because it isn't starting for another couple of minutes, I'll generally settle in on something else, and may never even know that the program was on. Or I may channel surf again around 9:15 when the first show goes to commercial, and find the other show. But at that point I'll realize that I've missed so much of the show that if I can still follow the story without having seen the first 15 minutes, then it wasn't worth watching anyway.
If a show runs to 9:01, then you can't Tivo a show on another channel that starts at 9
Nor can you watch all of both shows when they air. They are not just screwing the Tivo users, they are screwing up their core customers, the ones who watch live, commercials and all. This is hardly a new practice, Fox has been starting the Simpsons early for years. But it certainly is growing in it's adoption. It's not just a minute either, in many cases (at least with NBC) it's several, and those minutes can be on either end (the show might start early, or end late).
Rather than hurting the TIVO users, this pratice may well drive more normal viewers to becoming multiple tuner TiVo users (and skipping the commercials in the process).
The problem is, if you didn't get it when the getting was good, what source do you trust now? How do you get a copy of the screen saver and know that it's safe to run and that it doesn't contain a spammer's trojan to own your system (and spam from it)? I certainly wouldn't trust something I got from a P2P network this way. And I expect people will even hesitate to trust the Lycos site for at least a while, since we know the spammers can control that site.
Maybe a source code copy that you could compile yourself might be OK, but I doubt we'll see that. What other system can you trust as safe, except maybe to download something now and confirm it's MD5 sum as being known good with several trusted sources in a week or two?
No matter how illegal or unethical that cause may be!
I don'y believe it's either. The screen saver does not do a DNS, in fact it's written not to. The spammers obviously want a lot of traffic to their sites (they cram my mailboxes to try to get that traffic. Even started hitting my gmail mailbox tonight, and I've never given out that gmail address!). So I just see the application as a handy way to give them the traffic they want, maybe they can stop sending me so much mail to try to get it now. And it's hardly unethical. It's being done to try to stop or slow the scourage of the Internet. No ethical issues about it, these people not only cram inboxes to the extreme (some accounts where I get hundreds of pieces of spam a day are completely useless to me anymore), they have expanded their efforts to trojans and viruses to take over other systems. Any effort to slow or stop such people cannot be unethical.
I have not downloaded the screen saver and don't know how it works, but it would be a no-brainer to have written it to get it assignments when it goes active. After all, it certainly has Internet access (or it's can't run up the spammer's usage anyway). So it just has to check a site, get one or more assignments, and start running up the spammer's bill. Not a bad concept.
The spammer's response is a strong indication that it's a pretty good idea, and one they really don't like and see as an actual threat to them.
You used to be able to order optical sensors and other generic components by the box for less than the cost of a mouse
Yea, and my first ball mouse cost me over $75. Last week I got an optical mouse free, after rebate. Do you expect a mail order house to supply you with a box of sesors and other generic components for less than that?
You can also sign a petition and tell how much you would be willing to pay for the final product.
Wgat sense does this make. There are some people (not me) that might pay up to $500 for the newest ATI or Nvidia cards. But they do that with the knowledge that the hottest 3D applications will take advantage of them. More importantly, that is the price they might pay for those cards today. It's well known that in six months those cards might be worth half that, in a year perhaps around $100. How can anyone say how much you would be willing to pay for the final product when by that time it might not even compete with the $100 cards?
Now your unlisted number, that you went ahead and put on the do-not-call list to protect yourself from callers who just selected numbers randomly, will be given to the telemarketers as a number that is fair game for them to call. Your tax maney at work.
Perhaps you were not paying attention eariler this month. They showed lots of maps of the states on TV. They were all either red states or blue states. Kind of like pick your poison, But there were no green states. Just different types of evil.
Gee, it would be a real shame if people who wanted to send a message to companies about the evil of software activation used this chance to mount a massive D.O.S. attach on Valve, wouldn't it? That would be wrong.
Since Skype doesn't require any hardware, they got millions of users in a short time. Now stuff like this Siemens gizmo allow people to use regular phones to talk to all those Skype users.
If your point is Skype doesn't require any hardware and that matters to someone, then they stick with the PC and software solution. But if Skype is going to offer hardware, it should be a full hardware solution that takes the VoIP data and can connect to any other VoIP system. And yes, I knew there were other hardware solutions, but to my knowledge they don't work with with Skype. My point is that Skype would be better served by the software solution complimented by a hardware only solution that didn't require a PC and a USB port to always be there to support it.
I think they really missed the point. What the educated user wants is a box that you plug your phone into one end, and that you plug the other end into your Ethernet router. Not something that you have to plug into a USB port on a computer.
Heck, at almost no extra cost it could even include a small router(that could be disabled), so if the customer doesn't already have a router they just plug their computer into the box rather than the other way around. This just makes sense on so many levels, where as using a USB connection through a computer (and the required software that must go along with it) is really ugly.
No, not really. The basic problem is still bit rot. And not pushing technology to the bleeding edge, but rather than making the bits a little larger and a lot more reliable is still a much better solution. Here's why:
Yes, I known about PAR and PAR2 files. It's not hard to apply this technology to different size files, particularly when you're acrhiving 100's of gig of files. But the biggest flaw in this approach is that it depends on being able to actually find the files. It does nothing to protect the directory information on a disc. So if bit rot hits and makes directory information unavailable, well.....
On the other hand, making the bits a bit bigger gives you a much more relaible system. Realize that a bit twice as large is much much more than 200% as reliable as the smaller bit.
Someone already moderated you funny, but I think it's a real issue. Sure, use UV if it helps, but I would rather have them make the bits a little bigger and a lot more reliable than as small as they can get them and have them rot away. I could live with 100 gig of data on a disc if I could trust it a lot more than 500 gigs on one disc I can't trust.
Slashdot Mirror
NO, I certainly didn't say that. I said that in this case the two probabilities are 50%. That's clear from the fact that any swap of 2 tiles results in a change of state, and because there is clearly no preference for one state or the other in the original random selection of the 16 tiles (or 15 tiles and a space).
You can confirm this another way. Look at the case of having only 3 tiles in a 4 tile space. computer the perminations and how many of them are solvable (you can do it in your head). The answer is 50%. Enlarge the puzzle, to say 5 tiles in a 2x3 space. The probability doesn't change (if you think it does you would have to justify in which bias (solvable or unsolvable) it changes, and there is no dirrerence in either state). Enlarge it again. And so on, up to a 4x4 puzzle or larger.
So if you want to support your Not even statement, perhaps you can offer your own theory about what the probability is? And do you somehow think it favors solvable or unsolvable?
I suspect the real way to set this problem up for a user would be to leave the word RATE on the top line, or at least RAT, but to be sure that you swapped one and only one of the first two tiles when you did this. Or to leave it so very close to that solution that the user would likely make one move and be there (for example a top line of Y R A T and a second line of [space] [something ] [something] R, with the intended incorrect R and A in each position). But the way that you set the problem up just does not work.
What part of Price-Fixing is not clear?
This translates into:
Infineon stole so much that they could easily pay a $160 million cut to the government, who wanted their share, even though they did nothing to deserve it. In return they let the company continue to do business as usual, and suggest that they price fix in less obvious ways next time. They also asked the company to offer up a few scape goats, who would get a token amount of time in a federal luxury prison like Camp Cupcake or Club Fed, but would be out in even less time than Martha Stewart. The people who bought the artifically high priced memory get screwed.
But yes, it is crazy to let the actual people who did this off with such a slap on the wrist. They ikely will still draw their fat cat pay checks while in prison if they ever do go too!
Some things are just too simple to solve by a program. This is one of them. There are two states that the puzzle can be in, solvable or unsolvable. Any exchange of pieces changes that state. It might seem that there being 15 pieces rather than 16 has some effect on it and complicates things, but it doesn't. You get the exact same problem if you imagine that there are 16 pieces arranged randomly, and then that piece 16 is discarded before the puzzle is attempted to be solved. There is no preference at all for the solvable or unsolvable state when 16 pieces are put in a 4x4 matrix, so therefore there is no preference when 15 pieces and a blank space are put in a 4x4 matrix. So the solution, no matter how complex you make the computer program, will have to be 50%.
The UCE could well be coming from a taken over zombee Or a site where someone got wifi access (either because it's a public site or by a warspammer). Better to send a message to the person who is the source for the spam - they spam or pay others to spam for them, they also run up a high usage charge on their website that does not net them a return.
If a show starts early, like The Simpsons or The West Wing, the network hurts their own customers because many of these customers tune in on the hour and damn well know they have missed something. They might watch the rest, but ill will is bred by the network's act. And if they start a show late, well, channel surfers have little patience for that too. If I've just finished watching something that ran from 8:00 to 9:00, at 9:00 I scan across the dial to find something else to watch. I have a pile of TV guides on the coffee table, but to be honest I haven't opened one in months. If I miss seeing something that I might have watched because it isn't starting for another couple of minutes, I'll generally settle in on something else, and may never even know that the program was on. Or I may channel surf again around 9:15 when the first show goes to commercial, and find the other show. But at that point I'll realize that I've missed so much of the show that if I can still follow the story without having seen the first 15 minutes, then it wasn't worth watching anyway.
Nor can you watch all of both shows when they air. They are not just screwing the Tivo users, they are screwing up their core customers, the ones who watch live, commercials and all. This is hardly a new practice, Fox has been starting the Simpsons early for years. But it certainly is growing in it's adoption. It's not just a minute either, in many cases (at least with NBC) it's several, and those minutes can be on either end (the show might start early, or end late).
Rather than hurting the TIVO users, this pratice may well drive more normal viewers to becoming multiple tuner TiVo users (and skipping the commercials in the process).
Maybe a source code copy that you could compile yourself might be OK, but I doubt we'll see that. What other system can you trust as safe, except maybe to download something now and confirm it's MD5 sum as being known good with several trusted sources in a week or two?
I don'y believe it's either. The screen saver does not do a DNS, in fact it's written not to. The spammers obviously want a lot of traffic to their sites (they cram my mailboxes to try to get that traffic. Even started hitting my gmail mailbox tonight, and I've never given out that gmail address!). So I just see the application as a handy way to give them the traffic they want, maybe they can stop sending me so much mail to try to get it now. And it's hardly unethical. It's being done to try to stop or slow the scourage of the Internet. No ethical issues about it, these people not only cram inboxes to the extreme (some accounts where I get hundreds of pieces of spam a day are completely useless to me anymore), they have expanded their efforts to trojans and viruses to take over other systems. Any effort to slow or stop such people cannot be unethical.
The spammer's response is a strong indication that it's a pretty good idea, and one they really don't like and see as an actual threat to them.
Yea, and my first ball mouse cost me over $75. Last week I got an optical mouse free, after rebate. Do you expect a mail order house to supply you with a box of sesors and other generic components for less than that?
Wgat sense does this make. There are some people (not me) that might pay up to $500 for the newest ATI or Nvidia cards. But they do that with the knowledge that the hottest 3D applications will take advantage of them. More importantly, that is the price they might pay for those cards today. It's well known that in six months those cards might be worth half that, in a year perhaps around $100. How can anyone say how much you would be willing to pay for the final product when by that time it might not even compete with the $100 cards?
Now your unlisted number, that you went ahead and put on the do-not-call list to protect yourself from callers who just selected numbers randomly, will be given to the telemarketers as a number that is fair game for them to call. Your tax maney at work.
Damn, at first I read this as ""a new Information Bra is coming". I kind of like my way better.
Perhaps you were not paying attention eariler this month. They showed lots of maps of the states on TV. They were all either red states or blue states. Kind of like pick your poison, But there were no green states. Just different types of evil.
I count at leat 4 spinoffs:
CSI: Caruso
CSI: NY
NCIS (yea, it's pilot was an episode of JAG, but the show clearly has a CSI driven approach to it's stories and production)
CSI: NBC (aka Medical Investigation)
Gee, it would be a real shame if people who wanted to send a message to companies about the evil of software activation used this chance to mount a massive D.O.S. attach on Valve, wouldn't it? That would be wrong.
If your point is Skype doesn't require any hardware and that matters to someone, then they stick with the PC and software solution. But if Skype is going to offer hardware, it should be a full hardware solution that takes the VoIP data and can connect to any other VoIP system. And yes, I knew there were other hardware solutions, but to my knowledge they don't work with with Skype. My point is that Skype would be better served by the software solution complimented by a hardware only solution that didn't require a PC and a USB port to always be there to support it.
Heck, at almost no extra cost it could even include a small router(that could be disabled), so if the customer doesn't already have a router they just plug their computer into the box rather than the other way around. This just makes sense on so many levels, where as using a USB connection through a computer (and the required software that must go along with it) is really ugly.
Just because you are abusing your media, that's not a proof that those of us taking proper care of ours are not also seeing bit rot.
No, not really. The basic problem is still bit rot. And not pushing technology to the bleeding edge, but rather than making the bits a little larger and a lot more reliable is still a much better solution. Here's why: Yes, I known about PAR and PAR2 files. It's not hard to apply this technology to different size files, particularly when you're acrhiving 100's of gig of files. But the biggest flaw in this approach is that it depends on being able to actually find the files. It does nothing to protect the directory information on a disc. So if bit rot hits and makes directory information unavailable, well..... On the other hand, making the bits a bit bigger gives you a much more relaible system. Realize that a bit twice as large is much much more than 200% as reliable as the smaller bit.
Someone already moderated you funny, but I think it's a real issue. Sure, use UV if it helps, but I would rather have them make the bits a little bigger and a lot more reliable than as small as they can get them and have them rot away. I could live with 100 gig of data on a disc if I could trust it a lot more than 500 gigs on one disc I can't trust.
2) Notify ICANN to xfer it to you.
3) Spam owner of domain's mailbox with several thousand e-mails for the next five days (make titles of spam look something like ICANN sends).
4) Sell newly aquired domain.
5) Profit!