Recently, I had a colleague ask me what sorting algorithm he should use in the inner loop of some algorithm he was implementing. Most CS majors I've talked to just blurt out "QUICKSORT!" without thought. Ok, that's got an average runtime of nlg(n). After about an hour of discussion and analysis, we came up with an algorithm that ran in sub-linear time. Now's the time for the CS kids to blurt, "ZOMG, but you can't sort in less than O(nlg(n)!" Ah, but you can, if you know what your input is going to look like.
When a function gets executed billions or trillions of times, it's worth optimizing. Often times, doubling the speed of a deep internal function does nothing -- other times, it can cut the runtime of your program in half. I come from a mathematical background, and I do lots of computation. Often times, it can take a year or more to solve a problem with a quick implementation. Spend a few weeks optimizing it, and you might be able to solve the problem in a few hours.
There is no substitute for analyzing your code. And I do mean, sitting down with a writing implement and a blank surface, and tracing through the algorithm. Then, profiling the code and hammering down hotspots. And then, take a page out of Knuth's book -- throw the code away, and write it again.
ITP is a two-year graduate program located in the Tisch School of the Arts whose mission is to explore the imaginative use of communications technologies...
From what I've seen on her website, and her school's site, I'd describe her as an art student focusing on communication technology. This is definitely an experiment in communication, and it's definitely got an "artsy" angle to it. She certainly isn't claiming to be a computer scientist.
A little more digging on the Tisch website indicates that she's a Masters student. Having seen a number of "digital arts" masters and doctoral projects, I'd say this is pretty normal for a masters thesis. Hard or high impact? Probably not -- but it is neat, and she is putting a lot of work into it.
Welcome to the 21st century. Downloading 10GB takes a while, but I've got 80GB free on my *laptop* -- and I have three 20GB disk images for virtual machines. Disk space is cheap. If you've got 500GB and you don't have 10GB of contiguous free space... no, you probably don't want to install a new operating system.
Most operating systems (I'm not talking about Haiku or FreeDOS obviously) are meant to be installed on a clean system with a significant amount of hard drive space. What's the problem? I see none.
This will be really great when somebody takes control of the.corn TLD. It looks just enough like.com in certain fonts to phish the fuck out of people. Welcome to paypaI.corn! Please log in to give me all your ca$h!!!
When I've got mod points, the huge number of dropdown boxes makes the page very slow to load and scroll around on. Perhaps it would be better to switch to something more "2.0" than a dropdown box? Each comment gets a +/- corner like stories on the firehose, and when you click one, you get the usual options in the same format as moderating stories. This would require two clicks as always, and I think it should satisfy thePowerOfGrayskull's needs -- also, it has the added benefit of being 99% implemented already, and improving design coherence overall.
Crowdsource it! We'll make the icons for you. Just make an upload widget so users can submit icons. Maybe each achievement would get a little mini-poll where we can vote on each icon. What could possibly goatse wrong?
I have (almost) the exact opposite complaint. If I've suspended my laptop, or I haven't been in my slashdot tab for (gasp) more than an hour or so, a huge white block nearly covers the screen. In the upper-left corner of this huge obstruction is a tiny little link, "click to unpause". I'm not old, I'm a plenty skilled mouser, but it's still obnoxious to tab into a page and have it be useless until I nail a fidgety little link. One of two things would improve this:
First (my preference) would be to make the huge div that blocks 90% of the screen and darkens the borders into a little notifier down in a corner of the screen. Make it red, so people notice. Don't make it clickable, either. Just onpause the page when it gets focus.
Second, is if you really must make the page useless if it's paused (a really stupid idea, IMHO), and you really must require the user to click something to unpause, make the entire div clickable -- click anywhere on the huge obstruction and it goes away. Again, it would be better for the obnoxious obstruction (obnoxstruction?) to go away on focus, or on any mouse / keyboard activity whatsoever, but on focus is best.
No... in a real datacenter, there's no shit cluttering up the floor or the racks, and KVMs are a permanent solution -- either with a console in every rack, or a centralized solution. Of course, if you shop with Sun, there's really no need for a KVM because their ILOM rocks so hard -- run a little java applet, and you've instantly got keyboard, mouse, and you can mount local disks / images onto the machine. And, if you can VPN / tunnel, you can do it securely from anywhere in the world. In my experience, Sun salespeople are bastards, but their hardware is incredible.
You can learn the syntax of a language that is similar to other languages you already know in a few days, sure. But understanding a new approach to programming (dynamic vs. static, procedural vs. OO vs. functional vs. whatever), understanding the idioms and subtleties of a language, and learning the details of the available libraries, takes months.
Agreed. I think I said so in my post.
I've spent a substantial proportion of my career fixing the mess made by people who thought average programmers could be up to speed for that kind of work within a week or two, and another substantial proportion training those programmers afterwards until they were fit to operate autonomously, so I'm going to have to respectfully disagree with you on that one.
Huh. So, how do you expect programmers to learn? Do they get experience by sitting near an old guy with a big beard? Not really. People learn by making mistakes. The take-home lesson is, don't assign a new programmer to a new project. Assign a senior programmer to a new project, and assign a couple of lackeys to the senior programmer. Ideally, the new programmers will be up and running in a couple of days, able to hack the basics, fix bugs, etc. With a senior programmer checking their work, the damage they can do is pretty limited. Of course, if the senior programmer is a jackass who just wants the code written, then the damage the team will do is unlimited.
I don't claim that average programmers can be fit to operate autonomously in a couple of weeks, but I do think that they can be fit to operate in a couple of days. Also... you never let a new hire thrash around, unchecked, on your codebase -- I don't care how many of decades of experience (s)he has in whatever. Or better yet, implement a peer review system -- every line is double-checked, or the code doesn't go in. This is how Sage has been operating for quite a while now, and we've probably stopped dozens of bugs in their tracks.
The saying that a good programmer can learn a new language in a week is bull and always has been...
Really? I've learned about 20 different languages at one time or another, and in every case, I was up and running in a couple of days. Am I proficient at them all right now? Hell no. I currently work in C, Python, and Cython, and I'm decent with them all. Put me back onto a project using PHP, Perl, etc., and I'm confident that I'd be back up to speed in under a day.
Fluency, of course, takes years of experience. But knowing the language enough to fix bugs, implement algorithms, etc., should come to a good programmer in the matter of a week or two. Management of large projects requires fluency, but not every coder needs to be an architect.
1) The better quality the recording, the more they care. Also, even crappy microphones pick up noises whose frequency and duration are out of human hearing range.
2) Easy. Mandatory RFID in every state-issued ID card + RFID reader in every seat.
3) You answered it yourself. You can fit a helluva lot of data into a watermark over the course of a 90-minute movie.
Yes, they might. A friend recently got caught by a red light camera. They're incredible -- they mail you a picture of the intersection with your car in it, a closeup of the car, and a closeup of the license plate with enough resolution to clearly read the tabs. It will cost a few hundred to a couple thousand bucks to install a camera above each screen. I'd bet that if the MPAA required theaters to install such a system or simply stop carrying all major hollywood films, the theaters would do it. Pretty soon, people will get used to a bright flash between the previews and the start of the film. Add to that an infrared video camera, and they can keep track of people changing seats during the movie.
Interesting. William Stein (founder of Sage & SABDFL) is a number theorist, so uses latex for all of his word processing -- and this is true for many other Sage developers. It's easy to use latex from Sage, and apparently, William uses Sage from latex in some cases. Most of us are too comfortable on the commandline to really push a project like "make a revolutionary web-IDE", so I'm really glad to see projects like the FA.
It will definitely be interesting to see if "mashups" will ever bring us an incredibly intuitive Word Processor + Computer Algebra System + Typesetting Engine + IDE over the web. With Bespin, Google Documents, Sage and Latex, I can see the possibility, with about 5 years of hard work on all systems but Latex. But then, if I add "Automated Theorem Prover" and "Coffee Disposal Unit" to the mashup, I'll be out of a job.
Interesting. The source tarball for Sage is about 200MB, and a binary is about 400MB -- a few hundred MB is "massive bloat"? Most closed-source options are 2-4 times as large. Given the rather incredible dependencies of Sage, we'd be hard pressed to get it much smaller without a severe loss of speed / functionality.
And yes, Sage can read email. The Sage language is a superset of Python, hence the email module works as expected.
Who said there's no revision control? That falls under the heading, "with a little care and extra work" -- tight integration with mercurial is quite easy, since it has a nice python interface.
I'm a Sage developer, and our only GUI is a web interface. Run Sage on your local machine, and you serve to localhost. As Sage developers use the GUI, we're getting more attached to it, and we keep adding more IDE-like features. Recently, there have been discussions to make it easier to edit Sage directly from the GUI. With a little care and extra work, it seems as though we'll be able to make the system such that multiple developers can collaboratively edit the source, making messy merges a thing of the past.
I won't claim that Sage will become a great IDE -- that's not our plan: we want to make great math software. But, the way that people write software is changing. Local editing tools are the best right now because they've had the most time to develop, and today's developers have grown with them. In 10 years? I'm not sure that the younger generation of developers is going to stick with a local copy of emacs. More and more tools are migrating to the web; I don't care to predict that the world isn't going to change.
This will have a rather fun side-effect: people wearing a piezoelectric jacket, talking on bluetooth cell phones -- talking to themselves, and constantly twitching to produce enough electricity to keep the phone on. Next, we'll hear about new subdermal neck-implanted antennas whose performance is enhanced by moisture. Then, the streets will be full of twitching, drooling businesspeople talking to themselves.
I liked Obama from the get-go. I voted for him in the caucuses, and was a delegate for him in my district. And then, something happened -- he picked the number one enemy of the people among the Democratic Party for his running mate. I dislike Hillary and her politics, but I'd rather see her than Biden as VP. From that point forward, I've been very skeptical about anything I hear coming out of Obama's mouth. He makes beautiful speeches about change, and hope. But what's Biden doing?
Biden has always been a huge proponent of the war on drugs, up to writing the law that created the position of Drug Czar, he's been a strong supporter of a number of unconstitutional laws "to protect us from ourselves", and he's always been a friend of big business. And look where it's gotten us? This man believes that corporate rights are more important than human rights; that our freedom is less important than our safety, and he wants to decide what "safety" means. Biden is a fuck, and Obama is an ass for picking him for a running mate. What's especially scary to me is that Biden is a professor of constitutional law -- typically the "angel" that should sit on the shoulder of every law student.
I have a good friend who is vegan. She spent two years in Africa. For a year before she went, she gradually re-introduced herself to meat because she realized that she would starve if she tried to be such a picky eater while she was there; or worse, die of food poisoning if she suddenly switched. When she came back to the US, she went back to veganism. If somebody really wants to go into space, they'll damned well eat whatever nutrition is available to them, or they'll die and the only tears shed will be over the resources wasted in putting a dumbass into space.
Slashdot Mirror
Recently, I had a colleague ask me what sorting algorithm he should use in the inner loop of some algorithm he was implementing. Most CS majors I've talked to just blurt out "QUICKSORT!" without thought. Ok, that's got an average runtime of nlg(n). After about an hour of discussion and analysis, we came up with an algorithm that ran in sub-linear time. Now's the time for the CS kids to blurt, "ZOMG, but you can't sort in less than O(nlg(n)!" Ah, but you can, if you know what your input is going to look like.
When a function gets executed billions or trillions of times, it's worth optimizing. Often times, doubling the speed of a deep internal function does nothing -- other times, it can cut the runtime of your program in half. I come from a mathematical background, and I do lots of computation. Often times, it can take a year or more to solve a problem with a quick implementation. Spend a few weeks optimizing it, and you might be able to solve the problem in a few hours.
There is no substitute for analyzing your code. And I do mean, sitting down with a writing implement and a blank surface, and tracing through the algorithm. Then, profiling the code and hammering down hotspots. And then, take a page out of Knuth's book -- throw the code away, and write it again.
ITP is a two-year graduate program located in the Tisch School of the Arts whose mission is to explore the imaginative use of communications technologies...
From what I've seen on her website, and her school's site, I'd describe her as an art student focusing on communication technology. This is definitely an experiment in communication, and it's definitely got an "artsy" angle to it. She certainly isn't claiming to be a computer scientist.
A little more digging on the Tisch website indicates that she's a Masters student. Having seen a number of "digital arts" masters and doctoral projects, I'd say this is pretty normal for a masters thesis. Hard or high impact? Probably not -- but it is neat, and she is putting a lot of work into it.
Welcome to the 21st century. Downloading 10GB takes a while, but I've got 80GB free on my *laptop* -- and I have three 20GB disk images for virtual machines. Disk space is cheap. If you've got 500GB and you don't have 10GB of contiguous free space... no, you probably don't want to install a new operating system.
Most operating systems (I'm not talking about Haiku or FreeDOS obviously) are meant to be installed on a clean system with a significant amount of hard drive space. What's the problem? I see none.
This will be really great when somebody takes control of the .corn TLD. It looks just enough like .com in certain fonts to phish the fuck out of people. Welcome to paypaI.corn! Please log in to give me all your ca$h!!!
When I've got mod points, the huge number of dropdown boxes makes the page very slow to load and scroll around on. Perhaps it would be better to switch to something more "2.0" than a dropdown box? Each comment gets a +/- corner like stories on the firehose, and when you click one, you get the usual options in the same format as moderating stories. This would require two clicks as always, and I think it should satisfy thePowerOfGrayskull's needs -- also, it has the added benefit of being 99% implemented already, and improving design coherence overall.
Crowdsource it! We'll make the icons for you. Just make an upload widget so users can submit icons. Maybe each achievement would get a little mini-poll where we can vote on each icon. What could possibly goatse wrong?
Hmm. Not terribly intuitive. I maintain my position that the huge box is a PITFA.
I have (almost) the exact opposite complaint. If I've suspended my laptop, or I haven't been in my slashdot tab for (gasp) more than an hour or so, a huge white block nearly covers the screen. In the upper-left corner of this huge obstruction is a tiny little link, "click to unpause". I'm not old, I'm a plenty skilled mouser, but it's still obnoxious to tab into a page and have it be useless until I nail a fidgety little link. One of two things would improve this:
First (my preference) would be to make the huge div that blocks 90% of the screen and darkens the borders into a little notifier down in a corner of the screen. Make it red, so people notice. Don't make it clickable, either. Just onpause the page when it gets focus.
Second, is if you really must make the page useless if it's paused (a really stupid idea, IMHO), and you really must require the user to click something to unpause, make the entire div clickable -- click anywhere on the huge obstruction and it goes away. Again, it would be better for the obnoxious obstruction (obnoxstruction?) to go away on focus, or on any mouse / keyboard activity whatsoever, but on focus is best.
No... in a real datacenter, there's no shit cluttering up the floor or the racks, and KVMs are a permanent solution -- either with a console in every rack, or a centralized solution. Of course, if you shop with Sun, there's really no need for a KVM because their ILOM rocks so hard -- run a little java applet, and you've instantly got keyboard, mouse, and you can mount local disks / images onto the machine. And, if you can VPN / tunnel, you can do it securely from anywhere in the world. In my experience, Sun salespeople are bastards, but their hardware is incredible.
You can learn the syntax of a language that is similar to other languages you already know in a few days, sure. But understanding a new approach to programming (dynamic vs. static, procedural vs. OO vs. functional vs. whatever), understanding the idioms and subtleties of a language, and learning the details of the available libraries, takes months.
Agreed. I think I said so in my post.
I've spent a substantial proportion of my career fixing the mess made by people who thought average programmers could be up to speed for that kind of work within a week or two, and another substantial proportion training those programmers afterwards until they were fit to operate autonomously, so I'm going to have to respectfully disagree with you on that one.
Huh. So, how do you expect programmers to learn? Do they get experience by sitting near an old guy with a big beard? Not really. People learn by making mistakes. The take-home lesson is, don't assign a new programmer to a new project. Assign a senior programmer to a new project, and assign a couple of lackeys to the senior programmer. Ideally, the new programmers will be up and running in a couple of days, able to hack the basics, fix bugs, etc. With a senior programmer checking their work, the damage they can do is pretty limited. Of course, if the senior programmer is a jackass who just wants the code written, then the damage the team will do is unlimited.
I don't claim that average programmers can be fit to operate autonomously in a couple of weeks, but I do think that they can be fit to operate in a couple of days. Also... you never let a new hire thrash around, unchecked, on your codebase -- I don't care how many of decades of experience (s)he has in whatever. Or better yet, implement a peer review system -- every line is double-checked, or the code doesn't go in. This is how Sage has been operating for quite a while now, and we've probably stopped dozens of bugs in their tracks.
The saying that a good programmer can learn a new language in a week is bull and always has been...
Really? I've learned about 20 different languages at one time or another, and in every case, I was up and running in a couple of days. Am I proficient at them all right now? Hell no. I currently work in C, Python, and Cython, and I'm decent with them all. Put me back onto a project using PHP, Perl, etc., and I'm confident that I'd be back up to speed in under a day.
Fluency, of course, takes years of experience. But knowing the language enough to fix bugs, implement algorithms, etc., should come to a good programmer in the matter of a week or two. Management of large projects requires fluency, but not every coder needs to be an architect.
A reliable network source? Surely that couldn't be faked on an isolated network!
Let me get this straight.
* You don't sweat a lot
* You bought a rock
* You rubbed the rock in your armpit
* You don't stink because you don't sweat a lot
Y'know... you could just cut out the middle steps. Also, what if he's allergic to rocks?
Yes, but your device doesn't seem to survive the drop test, either.
1) The better quality the recording, the more they care. Also, even crappy microphones pick up noises whose frequency and duration are out of human hearing range.
2) Easy. Mandatory RFID in every state-issued ID card + RFID reader in every seat.
3) You answered it yourself. You can fit a helluva lot of data into a watermark over the course of a 90-minute movie.
Yes, they might. A friend recently got caught by a red light camera. They're incredible -- they mail you a picture of the intersection with your car in it, a closeup of the car, and a closeup of the license plate with enough resolution to clearly read the tabs. It will cost a few hundred to a couple thousand bucks to install a camera above each screen. I'd bet that if the MPAA required theaters to install such a system or simply stop carrying all major hollywood films, the theaters would do it. Pretty soon, people will get used to a bright flash between the previews and the start of the film. Add to that an infrared video camera, and they can keep track of people changing seats during the movie.
Interesting. William Stein (founder of Sage & SABDFL) is a number theorist, so uses latex for all of his word processing -- and this is true for many other Sage developers. It's easy to use latex from Sage, and apparently, William uses Sage from latex in some cases. Most of us are too comfortable on the commandline to really push a project like "make a revolutionary web-IDE", so I'm really glad to see projects like the FA.
It will definitely be interesting to see if "mashups" will ever bring us an incredibly intuitive Word Processor + Computer Algebra System + Typesetting Engine + IDE over the web. With Bespin, Google Documents, Sage and Latex, I can see the possibility, with about 5 years of hard work on all systems but Latex. But then, if I add "Automated Theorem Prover" and "Coffee Disposal Unit" to the mashup, I'll be out of a job.
Interesting. The source tarball for Sage is about 200MB, and a binary is about 400MB -- a few hundred MB is "massive bloat"? Most closed-source options are 2-4 times as large. Given the rather incredible dependencies of Sage, we'd be hard pressed to get it much smaller without a severe loss of speed / functionality.
And yes, Sage can read email. The Sage language is a superset of Python, hence the email module works as expected.
Who said there's no revision control? That falls under the heading, "with a little care and extra work" -- tight integration with mercurial is quite easy, since it has a nice python interface.
I'm a Sage developer, and our only GUI is a web interface. Run Sage on your local machine, and you serve to localhost. As Sage developers use the GUI, we're getting more attached to it, and we keep adding more IDE-like features. Recently, there have been discussions to make it easier to edit Sage directly from the GUI. With a little care and extra work, it seems as though we'll be able to make the system such that multiple developers can collaboratively edit the source, making messy merges a thing of the past.
I won't claim that Sage will become a great IDE -- that's not our plan: we want to make great math software. But, the way that people write software is changing. Local editing tools are the best right now because they've had the most time to develop, and today's developers have grown with them. In 10 years? I'm not sure that the younger generation of developers is going to stick with a local copy of emacs. More and more tools are migrating to the web; I don't care to predict that the world isn't going to change.
This will have a rather fun side-effect: people wearing a piezoelectric jacket, talking on bluetooth cell phones -- talking to themselves, and constantly twitching to produce enough electricity to keep the phone on. Next, we'll hear about new subdermal neck-implanted antennas whose performance is enhanced by moisture. Then, the streets will be full of twitching, drooling businesspeople talking to themselves.
Then you harvest some nanopower from the raindrops falling onto your jacket.
...eats more memory that an elephant zombie.
There, I fixed that for you.
I liked Obama from the get-go. I voted for him in the caucuses, and was a delegate for him in my district. And then, something happened -- he picked the number one enemy of the people among the Democratic Party for his running mate. I dislike Hillary and her politics, but I'd rather see her than Biden as VP. From that point forward, I've been very skeptical about anything I hear coming out of Obama's mouth. He makes beautiful speeches about change, and hope. But what's Biden doing?
Biden has always been a huge proponent of the war on drugs, up to writing the law that created the position of Drug Czar, he's been a strong supporter of a number of unconstitutional laws "to protect us from ourselves", and he's always been a friend of big business. And look where it's gotten us? This man believes that corporate rights are more important than human rights; that our freedom is less important than our safety, and he wants to decide what "safety" means. Biden is a fuck, and Obama is an ass for picking him for a running mate. What's especially scary to me is that Biden is a professor of constitutional law -- typically the "angel" that should sit on the shoulder of every law student.
I have a good friend who is vegan. She spent two years in Africa. For a year before she went, she gradually re-introduced herself to meat because she realized that she would starve if she tried to be such a picky eater while she was there; or worse, die of food poisoning if she suddenly switched. When she came back to the US, she went back to veganism. If somebody really wants to go into space, they'll damned well eat whatever nutrition is available to them, or they'll die and the only tears shed will be over the resources wasted in putting a dumbass into space.