It's pretty difficult for an HDMI cable to be just bad enough that enough bit errors can pass through the error correction that you can see glitches on screen, yet the cable still works AT ALL.
In fact, I highly doubt it's even mathematically possible.
How many times have we lit fires that were supposed to be safe but burnt down the forest? If there's a chance the fire can spread through surrounding vegetation, then there is a chance of a forest fire.
So, what do I say? Cooked food is evil. Let's just do it the old, risk-free way - eat things raw.
Yes. PD5 user here. Parallels Desktop 5 is much faster than 4 in my experience. The reviewer should have doubled checked that he's reviewing the newest releases.
Even with realistic simulation, the law of natural selection and the law of scarcity still apply. As long as the civilization still reproduce and expand, in economy and/or in population - they'll always need more from the real world.
So I don't think realistic simulation changes too much here. The civilization will still need to expand and innovate.
First, why would other intelligent life bother to stop us? Because resources in the universe is scarce? Last time I checked we haven't discovered any Dyson Sphere built around any of the stars in the Milky Way. And why has nobody scooped up all the intergalactic medium in outer space? Have our telescopes seen anybody moving stars around for energy transport? People using the beam from active galactic nuclei as weapons? No? If those ultra-intelligent life are really as good as they're hyped up to be, why aren't we seeing some totally amazing stuff happening all around us?
Second thing, it didn't really take much time for life to appear on Earth on a cosmic timescale. If you look at the time it took for our solar system and life to form, it is actually on the same order of magnitude to the whole history of the whole universe itself. If we're one of the late-comers, shouldn't we find that the universe has formed 1 trillion years ago, our solar system has only formed in the last 5 billion years, and life only in the last 2 billion years? Instead, what we're seeing now is, the universe formed some 13 billion years ago, our solar system formed 9 billion years ago, and life appeared in the last 3.5 billion years. There's actually a pretty decent chance that we're one of the earliest intelligent life in the universe.
You know, if immortality is within reach of my generation, I'm totally looking forward to have an AGN as my toy.
The GP has a point there. In the merchant's perspective, the cost of the extra training, weapons and guards is compared to the profit derived from shipping the cargo, not from the cost of the cargo. Right now, cargoes just aren't stolen often enough for the cost of the cargo and insurance itself to become a significant factor. (Yeah, I know it's cold, but it's mathematics)
There'll always be a fringe group of people who'll commit murder, yes.
But the problem right now is that it's economically favorable for the rational people in Somalia to become pirates - not much money from legitimate jobs in home country; low risk and high reward for piracy.
So, it should be possible to significantly reduce piracy by making it at least economically infeasible. i.e. make the risk of becoming a pirate in Somalia far greater than its potential rewards. This weeds out the non-insane part of the population from joining the pirates. It does not solve the problem in one go but it does make the problem smaller.
Agreed - there can be more mundane reasons for this. e.g. the sands got washed away faster than they're refilled due to other changes to the environment.
Another thing you might think you're "addressing" me is that you think I don't think there's a next stage after the take home exams. So if you're not trying to be funny to make yourself look like a PHB... the question would lie in how much extra time it takes over simply looking at resumes.
A take home exam is just a few questions specifically related to the position (which is why your argument on university doing a better job doesn't even make sense - your university understands each and every computer related position in the industry?!) - that you email to the applicants. If you can't be bothered to set up a few questions about the position you're hiring, I don't think you're serious about hiring, anyway. The results are always much more relevant to the job position in question compared to just resume scanning. So given a small pool of applicants, it's worth it.
Now, if you mean you need to scan the resumes to filter out those "illiterates" - I haven't seen so many people who can't write their resumes properly. But I've seen plenty of people who can't answer simple questions properly.
So basically, I don't think your reply makes sense. Either you're still trying to be "funny", or you're one of those HR drones that everybody hates.
The problem here is "a few dozen". In rebutting my argument, you're discarding an important qualifier I've put in unambiguously, and thus you're arguing against a straw man that has nothing to do with what I said.
If you're getting a few hundred resumes per day - fine. A few dozen... Why... is it gonna take your whole department a whole work day to look through the answers that don't make sense?
It's not as if your single test is going to be a better indicator of their abilities.
You mean the university Professors understand what my company needs more than I? Do they happen to be in the Board of Directors in my company too? Or that Computer Science is just a small generic field that the 4 year college is gonna teach EVERYTHING?
If it's just a few dozens you can just give them a take home exam. Using the resume alone in filtering people is sleazy if you can afford ANY other method of filtering.
btw if you think I'm having problem at the hiring process - i.e. my filter is wrong. No. I've tried hiring Hong Kong developers for FCKeditor/CKEditor in the past, but I ended up hiring somebody from Beijing, and that guy is actually good. Now I'm running my low cost startup. Mainland China doesn't offer a lot of choices for me because I'm not exactly in their community and not a lot of people know the things I need them to know - iPhone SDK and Objective-C. Believe it or not, Shaizai mobile phone games in China make a ton more money than those poor App Store Developers. And by "poor" I mean even Tapulous is doing poorly. Shanzai mbile game makers in Beijing can make hundreds of millions of Yuan per year in pure revenue quite easily - why do you need VCs to dilute your shares of profits?
But I've digressed. So the people I'm found in Hong Kong are already those who took time to learn something not taught (Objective-C) themselves - the elites! Oh yeah...
Maybe the US is better. I'm in Hong Kong and these are what I see with local graduates:
Theory - they can recite to you how to write recursive quick sort if you ask them, but they still write unnecessarily complicated code that runs in high polynomial times or even exponential times nevertheless. Worse, they don't even know why their program ends up running slowly afterwards. When the time comes for optimization, they take blind guesses instead of using proper profiling tools.
The most common reasons for slow programs aren't never about someone using bubble sort rather than quick sort, or performing random access on a linked list rather than a skip list - that almost never happens. If a particular algorithm is very important for a particular operation I would have told the programmers beforehand. The most most common reason for slow code is because somebody doesn't have a good sense of design and a good sense of what's happening in library functions, and did something stupid without knowing it. 4-year (it's 3 years in HK) college alone doesn't help that. In fact, what I've seen is that university graduates grossly overestimate their ability at it. Technical college people would just look at the profiler or timer outputs and optimize accordingly, or ask me if there's something they can't understand (uni. graduates hate asking, for some reason).
Exposure to lots of different programming and design styles - everybody is bad at it here, except those who go to learn it themselves. Everybody in the CS or Comp. Eng. programs need to learn Assembly (x86 and MIPS), C++, Java, Scheme and Prolog - everybody hates the Professor who teaches Scheme and Prolog (who happens to be my FYP supervisor, but I actually liked him) because they don't see how they're used in real jobs. Almost everybody hates the C++ courses because their understanding of memory management stops at new and delete, and thus the most common thing that anyone's C++ program does is segmentation fault. Only those who learn things themselves would care about object ownership and memory debuggers like Valgrind. Java is perhaps the only thing that most people can actually code in, but my university's courses are mostly taught in C++. People do well in asm projects - but that's only because those projects are exceedingly simple. A game of mastermind in MIPS asm is considered "very difficult" here.
Database design - they can draw E-R diagrams. It stops there. What's normalization? Why do you need indexes? What's a constraint? Why are you asking me to search Google? Fuck. I just wasted a lot of time explaining exactly these things to a university graduates 2 weeks ago, when I asked him to design a relatively simple PostgreSQL db schema with very clearly laid out requirements. "What did YOU do in your database course projects, at all?!" "My course db schema only had three tables!" I gave plenty of lecture on that guy and had him redesign the schema, and he got it after 3 tries. But had I not been busy at other tasks, I could have done it much quicker.
Oh, and forget about asking these guys to use the command line client (mysql, psql, mysql-dump, etc.) - they can't navigate a Linux shell for the life of it. You HAVE to give them a GUI or web based management interface like phppgsql.
Strong English writing and speaking skills - I guess it's less of a problem in the US. Hong Kong is far better than mainland China here - you get grammatically correct English most of the time. Then, it stops there. They don't know how to use it to convey meaning. Code documentation looks like something written by a bad AI chat client - what the reader gets from the English can very often be totally different from what the programmer tried to convey.
btw, I'm a recent university graduates here and I'm also an employer here (I worked for a commercial open source project in my first two years after graduation and I'm now running my own startup) so I know both sides of the picture. Except for a few, unive
You can also... ehh... ssh to your iPhone and change it right after you jailbroke your iPhone. You'll need a wifi network and another computer to do that, of course.
GW Bush may be. But from the stories I've seen so far, Bill Gates seemed to be an extremely competent person back when he was young. Also, somebody destined for a law degree wouldn't have to play with PDP-10 computers unless he had something else in his mind, right?
Slashdot Mirror
It's pretty difficult for an HDMI cable to be just bad enough that enough bit errors can pass through the error correction that you can see glitches on screen, yet the cable still works AT ALL.
In fact, I highly doubt it's even mathematically possible.
How many times have we lit fires that were supposed to be safe but burnt down the forest? If there's a chance the fire can spread through surrounding vegetation, then there is a chance of a forest fire.
So, what do I say? Cooked food is evil. Let's just do it the old, risk-free way - eat things raw.
Yes. PD5 user here. Parallels Desktop 5 is much faster than 4 in my experience. The reviewer should have doubled checked that he's reviewing the newest releases.
Even with realistic simulation, the law of natural selection and the law of scarcity still apply. As long as the civilization still reproduce and expand, in economy and/or in population - they'll always need more from the real world.
So I don't think realistic simulation changes too much here. The civilization will still need to expand and innovate.
Again, what's up with the negativity?
First, why would other intelligent life bother to stop us? Because resources in the universe is scarce? Last time I checked we haven't discovered any Dyson Sphere built around any of the stars in the Milky Way. And why has nobody scooped up all the intergalactic medium in outer space? Have our telescopes seen anybody moving stars around for energy transport? People using the beam from active galactic nuclei as weapons? No? If those ultra-intelligent life are really as good as they're hyped up to be, why aren't we seeing some totally amazing stuff happening all around us?
Second thing, it didn't really take much time for life to appear on Earth on a cosmic timescale. If you look at the time it took for our solar system and life to form, it is actually on the same order of magnitude to the whole history of the whole universe itself. If we're one of the late-comers, shouldn't we find that the universe has formed 1 trillion years ago, our solar system has only formed in the last 5 billion years, and life only in the last 2 billion years? Instead, what we're seeing now is, the universe formed some 13 billion years ago, our solar system formed 9 billion years ago, and life appeared in the last 3.5 billion years. There's actually a pretty decent chance that we're one of the earliest intelligent life in the universe.
You know, if immortality is within reach of my generation, I'm totally looking forward to have an AGN as my toy.
Somewhere between 3 and 4, I'm sure sex will become an Olympics sport.
When a measly 1GB file takes half an hour to copy over 802.11g, you'll WANT 802.11n to work at your home.
Who doesn't have 3 or 4 computers at home these days?
For a game of American Army's complexity and quality, $3.3 million is actually pretty cheap. I'm actually impressed by the Army's efficiency here.
The invisible person would run away the moment you put on your robe and wizard hat - so it won't work.
But you can make listen checks.
Is it the type of offer they can't refuse?
They have an episode about firing "alternative" ammo from a cannon.
http://mythbustersresults.com/episode92
If someone modded the air cannon to fire heavy chains at a high enough pressure, it can be very lethal.
The GP has a point there. In the merchant's perspective, the cost of the extra training, weapons and guards is compared to the profit derived from shipping the cargo, not from the cost of the cargo. Right now, cargoes just aren't stolen often enough for the cost of the cargo and insurance itself to become a significant factor. (Yeah, I know it's cold, but it's mathematics)
There'll always be a fringe group of people who'll commit murder, yes.
But the problem right now is that it's economically favorable for the rational people in Somalia to become pirates - not much money from legitimate jobs in home country; low risk and high reward for piracy.
So, it should be possible to significantly reduce piracy by making it at least economically infeasible. i.e. make the risk of becoming a pirate in Somalia far greater than its potential rewards. This weeds out the non-insane part of the population from joining the pirates. It does not solve the problem in one go but it does make the problem smaller.
Agreed - there can be more mundane reasons for this. e.g. the sands got washed away faster than they're refilled due to other changes to the environment.
Another thing you might think you're "addressing" me is that you think I don't think there's a next stage after the take home exams. So if you're not trying to be funny to make yourself look like a PHB... the question would lie in how much extra time it takes over simply looking at resumes.
A take home exam is just a few questions specifically related to the position (which is why your argument on university doing a better job doesn't even make sense - your university understands each and every computer related position in the industry?!) - that you email to the applicants. If you can't be bothered to set up a few questions about the position you're hiring, I don't think you're serious about hiring, anyway. The results are always much more relevant to the job position in question compared to just resume scanning. So given a small pool of applicants, it's worth it.
Now, if you mean you need to scan the resumes to filter out those "illiterates" - I haven't seen so many people who can't write their resumes properly. But I've seen plenty of people who can't answer simple questions properly.
So basically, I don't think your reply makes sense. Either you're still trying to be "funny", or you're one of those HR drones that everybody hates.
If you're getting a few hundred resumes per day - fine. A few dozen... Why... is it gonna take your whole department a whole work day to look through the answers that don't make sense?
It's not as if your single test is going to be a better indicator of their abilities.
You mean the university Professors understand what my company needs more than I? Do they happen to be in the Board of Directors in my company too? Or that Computer Science is just a small generic field that the 4 year college is gonna teach EVERYTHING?
Your post has so many brackets I'm wondering if I'm reading your LISP...
If it's just a few dozens you can just give them a take home exam. Using the resume alone in filtering people is sleazy if you can afford ANY other method of filtering.
(Ok, I know you're trying to be funny)
btw if you think I'm having problem at the hiring process - i.e. my filter is wrong. No. I've tried hiring Hong Kong developers for FCKeditor/CKEditor in the past, but I ended up hiring somebody from Beijing, and that guy is actually good. Now I'm running my low cost startup. Mainland China doesn't offer a lot of choices for me because I'm not exactly in their community and not a lot of people know the things I need them to know - iPhone SDK and Objective-C. Believe it or not, Shaizai mobile phone games in China make a ton more money than those poor App Store Developers. And by "poor" I mean even Tapulous is doing poorly. Shanzai mbile game makers in Beijing can make hundreds of millions of Yuan per year in pure revenue quite easily - why do you need VCs to dilute your shares of profits?
But I've digressed. So the people I'm found in Hong Kong are already those who took time to learn something not taught (Objective-C) themselves - the elites! Oh yeah...
The most common reasons for slow programs aren't never about someone using bubble sort rather than quick sort, or performing random access on a linked list rather than a skip list - that almost never happens. If a particular algorithm is very important for a particular operation I would have told the programmers beforehand. The most most common reason for slow code is because somebody doesn't have a good sense of design and a good sense of what's happening in library functions, and did something stupid without knowing it. 4-year (it's 3 years in HK) college alone doesn't help that. In fact, what I've seen is that university graduates grossly overestimate their ability at it. Technical college people would just look at the profiler or timer outputs and optimize accordingly, or ask me if there's something they can't understand (uni. graduates hate asking, for some reason).
Oh, and forget about asking these guys to use the command line client (mysql, psql, mysql-dump, etc.) - they can't navigate a Linux shell for the life of it. You HAVE to give them a GUI or web based management interface like phppgsql.
btw, I'm a recent university graduates here and I'm also an employer here (I worked for a commercial open source project in my first two years after graduation and I'm now running my own startup) so I know both sides of the picture. Except for a few, unive
It's long and hard and full of sea men.
What's the difference between a laser and a frickin' laser?
You can also... ehh... ssh to your iPhone and change it right after you jailbroke your iPhone. You'll need a wifi network and another computer to do that, of course.
If you look careful at that guy's user name, you'll notice that it's someone who definitely have the money to buy a new Prius every month.
GW Bush may be. But from the stories I've seen so far, Bill Gates seemed to be an extremely competent person back when he was young. Also, somebody destined for a law degree wouldn't have to play with PDP-10 computers unless he had something else in his mind, right?