Having read this I skipped to your journal entry. One thing: loads of peeps will have trouble to discern whether you are being sarcastic or honest - really. Just see some of the replies to your post B}
This can lead to storage problems and a possible race condition. What about parties that do not reply? How long will they be kept in your 'list-of-people-I-have-sent-an-automatic-reply-to' ? What if you get a 'I-could-not-deliver-your-message' type of message? Automatically reply to that.. and.. hey.. you started a loop.
Duuuuude, I worked on combination of experimental code and legacy code that we had not written, with still-under-development hardware that I only had a crappy datasheet for and a completely new suite of remote tools with a truckload of documentation. It was all horrrrrilby slow - looking at docs, plugging boards, typing, debugging - Then I managed to pull some guy off a project to come and work with me. Speeeed! One could browse through the docs while the other was still coding then he'd suggest where to go to implement some new functionality... the problem was the system was so large and new to us, there were just too many things for one person to remember at one time. Working in pairs really worked in that occassion.
Now, if I was doing routine GUI stuff for some lame application, pair-programming would not add anything. Would it?
But wait, wait, wait, they also took action against mp3.com and the VAST majority of stuff on mp3.com was by indie bands (and used to be a good place to find out about indie band if you could find the right m3p stations). Mp3.com was also trying for a loooong time to make a legitimate deal with labels, but they just wouldn't listen at the time (now that I take a look, it seems that at least some kind of label music finds its way into mp3.com).
Dunno, does anyone else have more details on this?
"Okay, and how big is dynamically linked hello-world.c? There aren't that many reasons to statically link a program. There may be some on reducing program size..."
I am afraid I do not udnerstand - how can static linking reduce a program's size? I'd think it does the opposite. No? Unless you mean, reducing the amount of memory the program takes up when it runs. In that case, that yould only be true if a single instance of a program that was dynamically linked to glibc would be running. Considering that everything out there uses glibc, I think it is really cool that you can just dynamically link it and save memory. Yes?
In my book static linking is always a big no-no, unless the libraries you use are not meant to be used by other programs anyway. Which is sometimes true for in-house stuff. But we used to make all code re-entrant and available as dynamically-linked shared libraries from the outset. Made things easier.
On another note, I remember ALL games on my amiga, no matter wether they were running at 10 or 50fps, had perfect synchronization of input, video display and audio. I know this was made possible because of input, copper and lisa interrupts, (for sound there was also the fact that you could update the sound-playing pointer in two cycles, i.e. there was no mixing buffer that would add latency.) but.. why doesn't it work with Linux? It seems very weird.
Interrupts also work on the user level - I am not sure how linux works, but a user level program could request to be added to a list of interruptable processes for a specific event. I am not sure how large the latency of an interrupt is, but I think most OSes can manage something below 10ms.
As for the sound, I find it extremely strange that people use mixing buffers the way they do in current linux games. If you know what is the sample-rate of the audio card and what position of the buffer it is currently reading from you can have SFX with latency that is NOT dependent upon the length of the mix buffer. Simply predict in which memory address you should write to, so that you are just ahead of the audio DMA. (I wouldnt think there are any cards that dont support DMA right now..).
"... doesn't offer me much comfort in the face of depression, loss, hurt, uncertainty, death, etc."
You need an impersonal, unanswerable, uncommunicative, intagible, inexplicable, mysterious God to give you comfort? How about your friends? God does not hand out answers and solutions to your problems. You have to do it on your own. This is true, irrespective of whether God exists or not.
"it happens that most of the particle-pair interactions that decay into antimatter particles only occur at very high energies compared to what our accelerators can achieve, and even then at low probabilities."
So, there are some particular, well-defined interactions that can decay into antimatter particles? Is there a specific mechanism related to this, also explaining the low probability? (Some reference on arxiv.org would be helpful, if you have any).
I think the 15% profit rule is also true for those governments whose members are not the usual honest, hard-working, benevolent politicians.
A road gets built? How much money will the contractor make? Will he not inflate the price artificially and bot the politician and the contractor take a piece of the pie?
Unfortunately, governments are made up of individuals. Greedy and selfish - they might see an opportunity for profit and grab it. This money is lost from the public domain and has become part of somebody else's private assets. Good, eh?
Oh, I just thought that possibly you can't get a lot of output in a collider because antimatter tends to re-combine with matter and gets lost again. Hm. Silly me.
Any physicists out there? Why is antimatter so hard to produce? What I know about the matter is limited to the following - (please correct me if you have the appropriate knowledge)
1. The amount of antimatter currently visible in the known universe is negligible compared to the amount of matter.
2. However, in the big bang, antimatter and matter are supposed to have been created in equal amounts. So where did antimatter go?
3. QED equations for antiparticles are exactly the same as those for normal ones if you reverse the direction of time.
The only conclusion that *I* can draw from this is that there is no antimatter left nowadays because it is travelling in the opposite direction in time, whatever that means.
That in turn gives a simplistic explanation of why it is hard to create antimatter - there is no causal relationship normally. According to my weird intuition, you can only create antimatter in a material universe by violating 'normal' causality.
Hm, the physical layer of the DSL line can just be described as a MODEM kind of thing. But there are other layers in the DSL box. That's why it is a bridge and not just a modem. DSL is supposed to be able to carry many different kinds of traffic and there are many different bridging protocls that you can use with it, depending on what you DSL box can actually do. Most of the bridging is related to EthernetATM stuff. Also, PPPoE in some cases. And if your box supports an ATM outlet as well (not a lotof chance, unless you're the ISP), you are going to have to call your box a switch B}
Exactly my sentiments - this is perhaps something that can only be fixed by issuing shares that must be held on to for a minimum period of time, at least 6 months, or increasing the cost of buying/selling shares so that short term trading cannot be profitable. I mean, why not tax the hell out of those people? They tax the lottery and casinos with something like 40% and even currency exchanges incur high levies in the region 5-10%. How why not the stockmarket? It's just a glorified casino nowadays.
Who is going to do that? The companies? Or perhaps, the goverment will enforce the use of such contracts? Keep in mind that during the months before the telecoms crash, most goverments in Europe actively encouraged common people to go out and buy stock and they used the short-term, noisy, biased indicator that the stock-market is as proof that the country economy was stable, improving, etc.
The truth is, stockmarkets don't work - not in the way I'd like them to anyway - they're just a big bazaar, where wize-guys can go and con other people of their money. So, if a company decides to go for an initial public offering - and thus enter the pit - they'll be getting what they deserve.
Pay attention to page three:
It is natural to generalize the Tetris gameboard to m-by-n, since a relatively simple dynamic program solves the case of a constant-size gameboard in time polynomial in the number of pieces
I guess this means that hey, they are talking about something else that the normal constant-size gameboard!
Also, page 25, gives a subtle hint that this is not about standard Tetris:
What is the complexity of Tetris for a gameboard with a constant number of rows?
What can we say about the difficulty of playing online Tetris if pieces are generated independently at random according to the uniform distribution?..
Also, the authors concentrate on playing optimal with respect to the number of lines cleared and the number of tetrises achived (either objective, not both) - and do not concentrate on, say, not losing (They give references to the hardness of not losing in the first chapter)
Well, you could hear the engines. Even if it is a vacuum, the engines burn something of which the end result is a gas vortex. Get into the vortex and you *might* hear it. I am not sure that you would be able to hear something or that you would survive the experience, though B}
Well, the mixed AD chip is almost irrelevant as far as size is concerned. Signal wavelength considerations are important, which determine the minimum length of copper connections.
Also lot of the space is taken up by the electromechanical filter (I think they are called ceramic oscillators, but I cannot be sure), which is basically just two comb-like structures of copper that are unconnected. Signals pass between each part by mechanical vibration)
I think the EU is getting its own version of the DMCA soon.. This legislation comes through because of the World Trade Organization. This was also the case for the US.
In effect, the corprorate entities, through the WTO, are enforcing legislature worldwide. I wouldn't be surprised if WTO becomes 'world govermnent organization' in a few years
Yes, that is the correct translation.
Unfortunately, most people in Greece do not understand the significance of this law and they think it is just an 'anti-gambling' law. Also
take a look here for some more comments.
Hey, it is something everyone can do - and does. I guess the more opinionated you are and the more intelligent your opinions sound (it is usually good enough if they are almost intelligible to the layman) - the better chances of you landing that job.
Most journalists are not merely reporters - they also like to stuff their own clumsy misinterpretations down our throats. If you are a know-it-all you too can be a professional commentator.:P
However, the reason that this happens is that unfortunately some people take journalists and commentators seriously.
AFAIK the page views do not increase the ranks. Only the links that determine hubs/authorities do.
Here are some of the papers relevant to the original research:
[1]
[2]
[3]
[4]
[5]
Or just
go here to see all the 500+ relevant papers.
Btw, [1] seems to be the original google algo so check that out first.
Hm, I can understand that this is beyond previous storage capacities, but I think this had been done before in the mid-90s. If I remember correctly, there were 2 or perhaps 3 different types of Magneto-Optical devices. Those worked by using a Laser (hence the optical, I guess) to heat up a specific part of the magnetic substrate so that it will be the only region that would be affected by a write. (and thus compensate for inaccuracies in the magnetic writing head, I guess?)
Well, I guess those devices had a different problem - but they used the same technology to fix it. (-how is the heating done in the new devices?)
This is what you get when news gets filtered down from a research report to a popular science magazine article and then, through a couple of clue-less journalists, to a sensationalist press release.
Slashdot Mirror
Having read this I skipped to your journal entry. One thing: loads of peeps will have trouble to discern whether you are being sarcastic or honest - really. Just see some of the replies to your post B}
Boing
Coffee may help reduce plaque on teeth, as reported here and here. But I guess this involves drinking your coffee like a real man :P
This can lead to storage problems and a possible race condition. What about parties that do not reply? How long will they be kept in your 'list-of-people-I-have-sent-an-automatic-reply-to' ? What if you get a 'I-could-not-deliver-your-message' type of message? Automatically reply to that.. and .. hey.. you started a loop.
Duuuuude, I worked on combination of experimental code and legacy code that we had not written, with still-under-development hardware that I only had a crappy datasheet for and a completely new suite of remote tools with a truckload of documentation. It was all horrrrrilby slow - looking at docs, plugging boards, typing, debugging - Then I managed to pull some guy off a project to come and work with me. Speeeed! One could browse through the docs while the other was still coding then he'd suggest where to go to implement some new functionality... the problem was the system was so large and new to us, there were just too many things for one person to remember at one time. Working in pairs really worked in that occassion.
Now, if I was doing routine GUI stuff for some lame application, pair-programming would not add anything. Would it?
But wait, wait, wait, they also took action against mp3.com and the VAST majority of stuff on mp3.com was by indie bands (and used to be a good place to find out about indie band if you could find the right m3p stations). Mp3.com was also trying for a loooong time to make a legitimate deal with labels, but they just wouldn't listen at the time (now that I take a look, it seems that at least some kind of label music finds its way into mp3.com).
Dunno, does anyone else have more details on this?
I am afraid I do not udnerstand - how can static linking reduce a program's size? I'd think it does the opposite. No? Unless you mean, reducing the amount of memory the program takes up when it runs. In that case, that yould only be true if a single instance of a program that was dynamically linked to glibc would be running. Considering that everything out there uses glibc, I think it is really cool that you can just dynamically link it and save memory. Yes?
In my book static linking is always a big no-no, unless the libraries you use are not meant to be used by other programs anyway. Which is sometimes true for in-house stuff. But we used to make all code re-entrant and available as dynamically-linked shared libraries from the outset. Made things easier.
On another note, I remember ALL games on my amiga, no matter wether they were running at 10 or 50fps, had perfect synchronization of input, video display and audio. I know this was made possible because of input, copper and lisa interrupts, (for sound there was also the fact that you could update the sound-playing pointer in two cycles, i.e. there was no mixing buffer that would add latency.) but.. why doesn't it work with Linux? It seems very weird.
Interrupts also work on the user level - I am not sure how linux works, but a user level program could request to be added to a list of interruptable processes for a specific event. I am not sure how large the latency of an interrupt is, but I think most OSes can manage something below 10ms.
As for the sound, I find it extremely strange that people use mixing buffers the way they do in current linux games. If you know what is the sample-rate of the audio card and what position of the buffer it is currently reading from you can have SFX with latency that is NOT dependent upon the length of the mix buffer. Simply predict in which memory address you should write to, so that you are just ahead of the audio DMA. (I wouldnt think there are any cards that dont support DMA right now..).
You need an impersonal, unanswerable, uncommunicative, intagible, inexplicable, mysterious God to give you comfort? How about your friends? God does not hand out answers and solutions to your problems. You have to do it on your own. This is true, irrespective of whether God exists or not.
"it happens that most of the particle-pair interactions that decay into antimatter particles only occur at very high energies compared to what our accelerators can achieve, and even then at low probabilities."
So, there are some particular, well-defined interactions that can decay into antimatter particles? Is there a specific mechanism related to this, also explaining the low probability? (Some reference on arxiv.org would be helpful, if you have any).
I think the 15% profit rule is also true for those governments whose members are not the usual honest, hard-working, benevolent politicians.
A road gets built? How much money will the contractor make? Will he not inflate the price artificially and bot the politician and the contractor take a piece of the pie?
Unfortunately, governments are made up of individuals. Greedy and selfish - they might see an opportunity for profit and grab it. This money is lost from the public domain and has become part of somebody else's private assets. Good, eh?
Oh, I just thought that possibly you can't get a lot of output in a collider because antimatter tends to re-combine with matter and gets lost again. Hm.
Silly me.
Any physicists out there? Why is antimatter so hard to produce? What I know about the matter is limited to the following - (please correct me if you have the appropriate knowledge)
1. The amount of antimatter currently visible in the known universe is negligible compared to the amount of matter.
2. However, in the big bang, antimatter and matter are supposed to have been created in equal amounts. So where did antimatter go?
3. QED equations for antiparticles are exactly the same as those for normal ones if you reverse the direction of time.
The only conclusion that *I* can draw from this is that there is no antimatter left nowadays because it is travelling in the opposite direction in time, whatever that means.
That in turn gives a simplistic explanation of why it is hard to create antimatter - there is no causal relationship normally. According to my weird intuition, you can only create antimatter in a material universe by violating 'normal' causality.
PS. I am *not* a physicist.
Hm, the physical layer of the DSL line can just be described as a MODEM kind of thing. But there are other layers in the DSL box. That's why it is a bridge and not just a modem. DSL is supposed to be able to carry many different kinds of traffic and there are many different bridging protocls that you can use with it, depending on what you DSL box can actually do. Most of the bridging is related to EthernetATM stuff. Also, PPPoE in some cases. And if your box supports an ATM outlet as well (not a lotof chance, unless you're the ISP), you are going to have to call your box a switch B}
Exactly my sentiments - this is perhaps something that can only be fixed by issuing shares that must be held on to for a minimum period of time, at least 6 months, or increasing the cost of buying/selling shares so that short term trading cannot be profitable. I mean, why not tax the hell out of those people? They tax the lottery and casinos with something like 40% and even currency exchanges incur high levies in the region 5-10%. How why not the stockmarket? It's just a glorified casino nowadays.
Who is going to do that? The companies? Or perhaps, the goverment will enforce the use of such contracts? Keep in mind that during the months before the telecoms crash, most goverments in Europe actively encouraged common people to go out and buy stock and they used the short-term, noisy, biased indicator that the stock-market is as proof that the country economy was stable, improving, etc.
The truth is, stockmarkets don't work - not in the way I'd like them to anyway - they're just a big bazaar, where wize-guys can go and con other people of their money. So, if a company decides to go for an initial public offering - and thus enter the pit - they'll be getting what they deserve.
Pay attention to page three: It is natural to generalize the Tetris gameboard to m-by-n, since a relatively simple dynamic program solves the case of a constant-size gameboard in time polynomial in the number of pieces
I guess this means that hey, they are talking about something else that the normal constant-size gameboard!
Also, page 25, gives a subtle hint that this is not about standard Tetris:
What is the complexity of Tetris for a gameboard with a constant number of rows?
What can we say about the difficulty of playing online Tetris if pieces are generated independently at random according to the uniform distribution?..
Also, the authors concentrate on playing optimal with respect to the number of lines cleared and the number of tetrises achived (either objective, not both) - and do not concentrate on, say, not losing (They give references to the hardness of not losing in the first chapter)
Well, you could hear the engines. Even if it is a vacuum, the engines burn something of which the end result is a gas vortex. Get into the vortex and you *might* hear it. I am not sure that you would be able to hear something or that you would survive the experience, though B}
Well, the mixed AD chip is almost irrelevant as far as size is concerned. Signal wavelength considerations are important, which determine the minimum length of copper connections.
Also lot of the space is taken up by the electromechanical filter (I think they are called ceramic oscillators, but I cannot be sure), which is basically just two comb-like structures of copper that are unconnected. Signals pass between each part by mechanical vibration)
Hm, so if you do something like:
ftp://blah:pass@site.com
they can capture it? (?.. - ) Cool, I love internet protocol integration under a single application!
I think the EU is getting its own version of the DMCA soon.. This legislation comes through because of the World Trade Organization. This was also the case for the US.
In effect, the corprorate entities, through the WTO, are enforcing legislature worldwide. I wouldn't be surprised if WTO becomes 'world govermnent organization' in a few years
Yes, that is the correct translation. Unfortunately, most people in Greece do not understand the significance of this law and they think it is just an 'anti-gambling' law. Also take a look here for some more comments.
Hey, it is something everyone can do - and does. I guess the more opinionated you are and the more intelligent your opinions sound (it is usually good enough if they are almost intelligible to the layman) - the better chances of you landing that job.
Most journalists are not merely reporters - they also like to stuff their own clumsy misinterpretations down our throats. If you are a know-it-all you too can be a professional commentator. :P
However, the reason that this happens is that unfortunately some people take journalists and commentators seriously.
AFAIK the page views do not increase the ranks. Only the links that determine hubs/authorities do. Here are some of the papers relevant to the original research: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] Or just go here to see all the 500+ relevant papers. Btw, [1] seems to be the original google algo so check that out first.
Hm, I can understand that this is beyond previous storage capacities, but I think this had been done before in the mid-90s. If I remember correctly, there were 2 or perhaps 3 different types of Magneto-Optical devices. Those worked by using a Laser (hence the optical, I guess) to heat up a specific part of the magnetic substrate so that it will be the only region that would be affected by a write. (and thus compensate for inaccuracies in the magnetic writing head, I guess?)
Well, I guess those devices had a different problem - but they used the same technology to fix it. (-how is the heating done in the new devices?)
This is what you get when news gets filtered down from a research report to a popular science magazine article and then, through a couple of clue-less journalists, to a sensationalist press release.
Here is the actual Research web-page