I worked as a part-time assistant in Data Structures and Algorithms course 10 years ago in Helsinki University of Technology.
JPEG is a lossy compression algorithm. It does not preserve the image. It creates these blocks of image data and then compresses them using Huffmann encoding. Same encoding is used in zip-files.
Dropbox's algorithm uses these same blocks JPEG algorithm produces (meaning, that the information is still lost in compression), but uses a clever way to compress them and ditches Huffmann encoding entirely.
So, the old process was: 1. Encode image into coefficients (lossy) 2. Encode coefficient blocks with Huffmann encoding
The new process is: 1. Encode image into coefficients (lossy) 2. Encode coefficient blocks with Lepton
Pfft.. too little, too late. JPEG is "good enough" and I don't want a huge clusterfuck of incompatibility problems with my libraries.
I have been developing software professionally for over 10 years now.
All these weird requirements (reports, bug tracking integration, email notifications..) are.. weird. Sounds like a manager is trying to use version control system for parts of his job. Or you are talking about continuous integration, and should look elsewhere, like CruiseControl.
Nevertheless, I will never ever again do a multiperson project without a version control system. Seriously, I even use version control on my personal projects. Version control is not a "nice to have", it is a must.
--
I work in a Fortune 500 Company and I recommend TFS or SVN for version control. GIT is not nice, since it requires user training. You just want to have your team developing as fast as possible and minimize the admin tasks.
Yeah, old algorithms and I wouldn't use this guy's work for my projects. You read about this stuff on a magazine. Kids these days read about this stuff on the net. I am hoping, that other media outlets have covered this as well. This article gives great ideas and hopefully inspires some future game developers, who are now in their teens.
Too bad it has some fairly advanced concepts, like Delaunay triangulation, which has been taken from a library and quite frankly - useless. Carmack himself speculated some years ago, that just pushing every wall in Doom to a modern GPU without any visibility checking would result in faster performance than raycasting or portals or any other 90s technique. And why do you need triangles, when the graphics pipeline supports quads? And why do they have to be roughly the same size? Have some faith in the GPU.
Good article. Would have been great, if it would have stuck with the trivial algorithms that do not require advanced CS courses. Spanning tree, anyone? I have have worked as a TA in university for a course teaching those subjects, but I didn't have a faintest idea about those in my teens.
I disagree. This was probably a mailing list, so if you receive a mail without hidden receiver addresses, like:
From: hospital.info@nhs.london.co.uk To: hiv.center@london.co.uk CC: Bob Burger <bob.burger@hotmail.com>, Cecil Cockburn <cecil1990@gmail.com>, David Davidson <dave@tesco.co.uk>, etc.. Subject: New treatment times for your HIV-infection and community meetings
It is not hard to imagine, that other people on the list would be infected with HIV as well.. Now the recipients know 800 other people, that have a high probability of being infected, too. How many people without HIV would actually subscribe to a newletter about it?
I worked as a TA in a university. There are people there also, missing deadlines and asking for higher grades. They just don't do it in front of everyone.
There is a simple solution to this problem: - Clear, written rules for all, posted at the beginning of the course - Enforcing those rules on forums too (people will cry, but let 'em) - Deadlines, that give time to finish the assignments - Deadlines, that do not move, even if they are bombing your city
I have encountered many of the same problems myself, taking MOOCs. They go away, when the instructors learn from these things and create new rules, and enforce them. This is how Coursera is evolving. The student material is the same, but the instructors learn from their previous problems with the students.
I've also noticed, that the quality of the forums is often based on a few bright inviduals , that really bring insights into conversations (and one of them was from India, and he was a better programmer than me (15 years of experience)). If everybody is a nagging idiot, well the forums are not going to be fun. That is the price we pay for free education without prequisities.
I am actually thrilled, to see Africans and other nationatilities on same courses, and graded the same as you Americans and us Europeans. They come from a totally different background and actually have to do real work, to even get materials for high level education. I wholeheartedly support bringing education to everyone, and have yet to see "free certicate" given to someone on a MOOC.
I live in Finland. If you suffer a hard crash, you don't have to pay thousands of euros, since healthcare is mostly free and in case of accident, they charge you like 15 euros booking fee and some additional expenses, if you need a room at the hospital to recover. But that is like 100 euros a night on public healthcare.
Insurance is mostly for the car damage (both cars) and it is required by the law.
--
The taxis are really expensive in Finland, the base fare is ~7 euros and you pay like 2 euros/km and there is extra for the drive time. In Estonia, the taxis cost one third of our prices and they have a decent taxi system.
For all this bureaucracy our taxi cars are mostly new, top shape and drivers get tax deductions on their cars. You would think, that they know the city they drive in, but half of the time they use navigators. You can pay by credit card and I have never been scammed in a Finnish taxi.
I am sure the taxi drivers are pissed, because using cheaper cars and drivers would bring the prices down to a realistic level (like less than 50% of current prices) and taxi drivers pay a premium to the dispatch centers for getting their fares.
Mostly taxis are used on friday and satuday nights, when people get home from the clubs and pubs. Having to wait 30 minutes for a taxi in a queue is common here and that generates a lot of fights, when drunken fools try to skip the queue. If some normal working man would like to generate a little extra income on those nights, that would be just awful - for the business..
I work as a business consultant on various IT projects. Certifications are required in my line of work.
They give points in application process when big firms and the public sector contracts us to do real projects. Even so much, that one certificate is equal to two years of work experience or more.
They have no effect on me doing my job and are all about memorizing stupid details on things I will never use. I would be more than happy if our clients would see them as a money making scam, that they really are. But such is life.
Hate 'em all you like, but silly IT managers who hire sub-contractors don't know any better.
The CPU/GPU is not the bottleneck anymore. The screen and wireless consume more power. The sad truth is, everything else has advanced, but battery technology is still in the last decade.
It appers to be to the same guy, who acted as a spokesman for LizardSquad, when they crashed the PSN - according to Brian Krebs: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/12/whos-in-the-lizard-squad/
For those of you, who can read Finnish, here is a short profile of the guy: http://nyt.fi/a1305912430161
I am a Finnish person and I think my share of this debt is closer to 2000 euro, but I wouldn't be suprised if it was same as your 3000 euro. Our goverment does a great job hiding these numbers from the public and they paid extra for some extra guarantees, that are now void.
However, I think differently. I think the normal Greek families are suffering. They have little money, they have to take pay cuts and unemployment rate is very high. And the Troika keeps dictating terms, new financial programs and new burdens to bear. I think it is rather normal, that some Greeks say "screw you and your programs" and refuse to comply.
So little has been accomplished.
I think the best solution for everyone is Greece voluntarily leaving the EMU and Euro. This will result in deflation of their currency, people being getting poorer, public riots and Drakhma being worth almost nothing. People will lose their savings and bad stuff will happen. But after a while the economy will recover and Greece will be back on track. It just gets darker before the dawn.
Right now, in Greece, the leader of opposition saw the bad moon rising and stepped down to avoid being in the next goverment. They are going to be hated for decades, because the have to choose between bad and really bad.
I have been coding commercial software since 2000. I worked as a teaching assistant for an introductory programming course in one of the top universities in my country.
I think these videos are awesome. One 2 hour video should be mandatory part of high school IT classes.
Every year, we used to get 2-5 people in our 700-800 people course, who do not belong. They are definately not becoming coders, they are in pain and shouting "IS THIS IT? IS THIS WHAT I HAVE CHOSEN? WHAT IS THIS SH*T?". Then they drop out or go on to pursue other study paths.
If they had seen a video about a coder in action, they would have quickly grasped the work they would end up doing in their careers. Young people seem to think, there is some sort of glamour in writing mobile games that they are blind to the reality of coding.
Just make sure, you know how to use the advanced features, should the need arise.
I mean, I know a guy, who teaches physics and basic programming in a public school. He thinks he writes great C++ code. He doesn't use templates, virtualization, [insert favorite c++ function here] . He doesn't even use use classes. He just uses a C++ compiler to compile his code. Total coding mastermind, if we look at the things he does not do..
Yeah, right. Amazon is adjusting the average score from the average score to some propietary algorithm. Yeah, there are talks about tweaks and the marketing makes it sound totally reasonable.
Amazon sells products. Amazon likes to sell products. Products with higher rating sell better. Products with poor rating sell worse. Amazon would like to sell more products.
I can bet $1000 right now that the "average rating" is going to go up.
Home users get forced updates, like you can read here: http://www.howtogeek.com/219166/you-won%E2%80%99t-be-able-to-disable-or-delay-windows-updates-on-windows-10-home/
Who tests these updates? Are the "happy" Insiders unwilling test subjects? Will you just get notifications, like: "Windows installed some potentially unstable updates on your computer. Please provide feedback and error logs before we release these to real users. Thank you for your co-operation."
me: Finding a decent IDE is not a problem anymore. You can find something for every language.
3. Mono Supports Mobile Development
me: So does Java and Swift. Why does EVERY article out there think you have to pick just ONE language and be stuck with that choice forever???
4. Mono Is Cross-Platform
me: Python, Java, C, C++, Ruby, and many, many more are all cross-platform, too!
5. Mono Powers Games Development
me: The guy is totally right. He has some great examples, too. Please just don't think, that you MUST use C# to get into game dev. For example, you can have much faster prototyping with PyGame. You can really learn to code in Swift over a weekend, if you have mastered one similar language well.
My advice to you is: pick any language, become good at it. Just don't do VB.NET or I will have to kill you.
Seriously, benchmarks are only relevant for the high-end Fiji. It is the series you buy, because you like AMD and have too much money.If you have $500-$700 set aside for a new GPU, some random benchmark is not going to change your mind. You would already have Titan or GTX 980 Ti, if you wanted Nvidia.
Did you even look at the cards? I know clicking on the article is a big deal, but you should try it sometimes. HBM allows the Fiji series to be SMALL. I don't see this bulk you keep talking about anywhere. The only big thing is the hybrid cooler on the best model, but hey, look at the other cards..
--
And finally about the benchmarks, we should talk about "Project Rebrand", which is not Fiji. Same old R7 cards get rebranded to 300-series and you could just look at the specs, get the benchmark of the previous generation and be 100% accurate.
When ever sub$300 card is a rebrand, I really don't see anything to buy here.
Firstly, for an IT professional, you are kinda low on details. I am going to assume, you want better wifi.
In five easy steps: 1. Turn of NAT, DHCP and WLAN from your provided router 2. Put the provided router in bridge mode 3. Attach AirPort Express (or any other new router) 4. ??? 5. Profit!
The problem you are facing, is that your provided router probably does too much work (in layman's terms) and heats up. Then it starts to break up.
Instead of mindless turning on and off again, why don't you just fix the problem and be done with it? Solutions, not more problems.
Meh. Only five years ago AMD had very competitive products in the server range. Opterons were efficient and cheap.
I remember Windows Azure launching in Europe with mostly Opterons inside and Steve Jobs buying that capacity to launch iCloud.
The servers at my workplace used to run on Opterons, too. Then our provider changed to Intel (you could still get AMD, but you needed to pay extra) and eventual server upgrades lead to total disapperance of AMD from my previous company.
I am pretty sure AMD was not a single digit player in the server market back then.
Slashdot Mirror
I worked as a part-time assistant in Data Structures and Algorithms course 10 years ago in Helsinki University of Technology.
JPEG is a lossy compression algorithm. It does not preserve the image. It creates these blocks of image data and then compresses them using Huffmann encoding. Same encoding is used in zip-files.
Dropbox's algorithm uses these same blocks JPEG algorithm produces (meaning, that the information is still lost in compression), but uses a clever way to compress them and ditches Huffmann encoding entirely.
So, the old process was:
1. Encode image into coefficients (lossy)
2. Encode coefficient blocks with Huffmann encoding
The new process is:
1. Encode image into coefficients (lossy)
2. Encode coefficient blocks with Lepton
Pfft.. too little, too late. JPEG is "good enough" and I don't want a huge clusterfuck of incompatibility problems with my libraries.
It is much easier to claim results if you don't need to validate the program functionality.
"100% of our students created a Twitter bot."
-> More research funding
-> No idiot test subjects to screw this up, they can't prove they wrote non-functional code
Yeah, right. This has nothing to do with selling overpriced accessories.
SourceSafe is a dead product. TFS is the new Microsoft offering.
I have been developing software professionally for over 10 years now.
.. weird. Sounds like a manager is trying to use version control system for parts of his job. Or you are talking about continuous integration, and should look elsewhere, like CruiseControl.
All these weird requirements (reports, bug tracking integration, email notifications..) are
Nevertheless, I will never ever again do a multiperson project without a version control system. Seriously, I even use version control on my personal projects. Version control is not a "nice to have", it is a must.
--
I work in a Fortune 500 Company and I recommend TFS or SVN for version control. GIT is not nice, since it requires user training. You just want to have your team developing as fast as possible and minimize the admin tasks.
Google Dashboard:
Throttle position
Speed
Coolant temp
Fuel Consumption
etc.
Apple Dashboard:
The car is moving.
My VMware does not use a Linux derived kernel, being a virtualization platform and all..
Yeah, old algorithms and I wouldn't use this guy's work for my projects. You read about this stuff on a magazine. Kids these days read about this stuff on the net. I am hoping, that other media outlets have covered this as well. This article gives great ideas and hopefully inspires some future game developers, who are now in their teens.
Too bad it has some fairly advanced concepts, like Delaunay triangulation, which has been taken from a library and quite frankly - useless. Carmack himself speculated some years ago, that just pushing every wall in Doom to a modern GPU without any visibility checking would result in faster performance than raycasting or portals or any other 90s technique. And why do you need triangles, when the graphics pipeline supports quads? And why do they have to be roughly the same size? Have some faith in the GPU.
Good article. Would have been great, if it would have stuck with the trivial algorithms that do not require advanced CS courses. Spanning tree, anyone? I have have worked as a TA in university for a course teaching those subjects, but I didn't have a faintest idea about those in my teens.
I disagree. This was probably a mailing list, so if you receive a mail without hidden receiver addresses, like:
From: hospital.info@nhs.london.co.uk
To: hiv.center@london.co.uk
CC: Bob Burger <bob.burger@hotmail.com>, Cecil Cockburn <cecil1990@gmail.com>, David Davidson <dave@tesco.co.uk>, etc..
Subject: New treatment times for your HIV-infection and community meetings
It is not hard to imagine, that other people on the list would be infected with HIV as well.. Now the recipients know 800 other people, that have a high probability of being infected, too. How many people without HIV would actually subscribe to a newletter about it?
Isn't the secong G graphics? If graphics pipeline is missing, this is just a multicore CPU..
I worked as a TA in a university. There are people there also, missing deadlines and asking for higher grades. They just don't do it in front of everyone.
There is a simple solution to this problem:
- Clear, written rules for all, posted at the beginning of the course
- Enforcing those rules on forums too (people will cry, but let 'em)
- Deadlines, that give time to finish the assignments
- Deadlines, that do not move, even if they are bombing your city
I have encountered many of the same problems myself, taking MOOCs. They go away, when the instructors learn from these things and create new rules, and enforce them. This is how Coursera is evolving. The student material is the same, but the instructors learn from their previous problems with the students.
I've also noticed, that the quality of the forums is often based on a few bright inviduals , that really bring insights into conversations (and one of them was from India, and he was a better programmer than me (15 years of experience)). If everybody is a nagging idiot, well the forums are not going to be fun. That is the price we pay for free education without prequisities.
I am actually thrilled, to see Africans and other nationatilities on same courses, and graded the same as you Americans and us Europeans. They come from a totally different background and actually have to do real work, to even get materials for high level education. I wholeheartedly support bringing education to everyone, and have yet to see "free certicate" given to someone on a MOOC.
I live in Finland. If you suffer a hard crash, you don't have to pay thousands of euros, since healthcare is mostly free and in case of accident, they charge you like 15 euros booking fee and some additional expenses, if you need a room at the hospital to recover. But that is like 100 euros a night on public healthcare.
Insurance is mostly for the car damage (both cars) and it is required by the law.
--
The taxis are really expensive in Finland, the base fare is ~7 euros and you pay like 2 euros/km and there is extra for the drive time. In Estonia, the taxis cost one third of our prices and they have a decent taxi system.
For all this bureaucracy our taxi cars are mostly new, top shape and drivers get tax deductions on their cars. You would think, that they know the city they drive in, but half of the time they use navigators. You can pay by credit card and I have never been scammed in a Finnish taxi.
I am sure the taxi drivers are pissed, because using cheaper cars and drivers would bring the prices down to a realistic level (like less than 50% of current prices) and taxi drivers pay a premium to the dispatch centers for getting their fares.
Mostly taxis are used on friday and satuday nights, when people get home from the clubs and pubs. Having to wait 30 minutes for a taxi in a queue is common here and that generates a lot of fights, when drunken fools try to skip the queue. If some normal working man would like to generate a little extra income on those nights, that would be just awful - for the business..
I work as a business consultant on various IT projects. Certifications are required in my line of work.
They give points in application process when big firms and the public sector contracts us to do real projects. Even so much, that one certificate is equal to two years of work experience or more.
They have no effect on me doing my job and are all about memorizing stupid details on things I will never use. I would be more than happy if our clients would see them as a money making scam, that they really are. But such is life.
Hate 'em all you like, but silly IT managers who hire sub-contractors don't know any better.
The updates will be tested on the happy people who got the "Free Windows Upgrade" as part of their Insider Program.
It will be their PCs that blow up, not yours.
Most likely not.
The CPU/GPU is not the bottleneck anymore. The screen and wireless consume more power. The sad truth is, everything else has advanced, but battery technology is still in the last decade.
It appers to be to the same guy, who acted as a spokesman for LizardSquad, when they crashed the PSN - according to Brian Krebs:
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/12/whos-in-the-lizard-squad/
For those of you, who can read Finnish, here is a short profile of the guy:
http://nyt.fi/a1305912430161
I am a Finnish person and I think my share of this debt is closer to 2000 euro, but I wouldn't be suprised if it was same as your 3000 euro. Our goverment does a great job hiding these numbers from the public and they paid extra for some extra guarantees, that are now void.
However, I think differently. I think the normal Greek families are suffering. They have little money, they have to take pay cuts and unemployment rate is very high. And the Troika keeps dictating terms, new financial programs and new burdens to bear. I think it is rather normal, that some Greeks say "screw you and your programs" and refuse to comply.
So little has been accomplished.
I think the best solution for everyone is Greece voluntarily leaving the EMU and Euro. This will result in deflation of their currency, people being getting poorer, public riots and Drakhma being worth almost nothing. People will lose their savings and bad stuff will happen. But after a while the economy will recover and Greece will be back on track. It just gets darker before the dawn.
Right now, in Greece, the leader of opposition saw the bad moon rising and stepped down to avoid being in the next goverment. They are going to be hated for decades, because the have to choose between bad and really bad.
I have been coding commercial software since 2000. I worked as a teaching assistant for an introductory programming course in one of the top universities in my country.
I think these videos are awesome. One 2 hour video should be mandatory part of high school IT classes.
Every year, we used to get 2-5 people in our 700-800 people course, who do not belong. They are definately not becoming coders, they are in pain and shouting "IS THIS IT? IS THIS WHAT I HAVE CHOSEN? WHAT IS THIS SH*T?". Then they drop out or go on to pursue other study paths.
If they had seen a video about a coder in action, they would have quickly grasped the work they would end up doing in their careers. Young people seem to think, there is some sort of glamour in writing mobile games that they are blind to the reality of coding.
Just make sure, you know how to use the advanced features, should the need arise.
I mean, I know a guy, who teaches physics and basic programming in a public school. He thinks he writes great C++ code. He doesn't use templates, virtualization, [insert favorite c++ function here] . He doesn't even use use classes. He just uses a C++ compiler to compile his code. Total coding mastermind, if we look at the things he does not do..
Yeah, right. Amazon is adjusting the average score from the average score to some propietary algorithm. Yeah, there are talks about tweaks and the marketing makes it sound totally reasonable.
Amazon sells products. Amazon likes to sell products. Products with higher rating sell better. Products with poor rating sell worse. Amazon would like to sell more products.
I can bet $1000 right now that the "average rating" is going to go up.
The opt-in testing is a big question mark..
Home users get forced updates, like you can read here:
http://www.howtogeek.com/219166/you-won%E2%80%99t-be-able-to-disable-or-delay-windows-updates-on-windows-10-home/
Who tests these updates? Are the "happy" Insiders unwilling test subjects? Will you just get notifications, like:
"Windows installed some potentially unstable updates on your computer. Please provide feedback and error logs before we release these to real users. Thank you for your co-operation."
1. C# Is a Great Language
me: Yes it is.
2. There's a Great Free IDE: MonoDevelop
me: Finding a decent IDE is not a problem anymore. You can find something for every language.
3. Mono Supports Mobile Development
me: So does Java and Swift. Why does EVERY article out there think you have to pick just ONE language and be stuck with that choice forever???
4. Mono Is Cross-Platform
me: Python, Java, C, C++, Ruby, and many, many more are all cross-platform, too!
5. Mono Powers Games Development
me: The guy is totally right. He has some great examples, too.
Please just don't think, that you MUST use C# to get into game dev. For example, you can have much faster prototyping with PyGame. You can really learn to code in Swift over a weekend, if you have mastered one similar language well.
My advice to you is: pick any language, become good at it. Just don't do VB.NET or I will have to kill you.
Benchmarks, we don't need no stinking benchmarks!
Seriously, benchmarks are only relevant for the high-end Fiji. It is the series you buy, because you like AMD and have too much money.If you have $500-$700 set aside for a new GPU, some random benchmark is not going to change your mind. You would already have Titan or GTX 980 Ti, if you wanted Nvidia.
Did you even look at the cards? I know clicking on the article is a big deal, but you should try it sometimes. HBM allows the Fiji series to be SMALL. I don't see this bulk you keep talking about anywhere. The only big thing is the hybrid cooler on the best model, but hey, look at the other cards..
--
And finally about the benchmarks, we should talk about "Project Rebrand", which is not Fiji. Same old R7 cards get rebranded to 300-series and you could just look at the specs, get the benchmark of the previous generation and be 100% accurate.
When ever sub$300 card is a rebrand, I really don't see anything to buy here.
Firstly, for an IT professional, you are kinda low on details. I am going to assume, you want better wifi.
In five easy steps:
1. Turn of NAT, DHCP and WLAN from your provided router
2. Put the provided router in bridge mode
3. Attach AirPort Express (or any other new router)
4. ???
5. Profit!
The problem you are facing, is that your provided router probably does too much work (in layman's terms) and heats up. Then it starts to break up.
Instead of mindless turning on and off again, why don't you just fix the problem and be done with it? Solutions, not more problems.
Meh. Only five years ago AMD had very competitive products in the server range. Opterons were efficient and cheap.
.
I remember Windows Azure launching in Europe with mostly Opterons inside and Steve Jobs buying that capacity to launch iCloud.
The servers at my workplace used to run on Opterons, too. Then our provider changed to Intel (you could still get AMD, but you needed to pay extra) and eventual server upgrades lead to total disapperance of AMD from my previous company
I am pretty sure AMD was not a single digit player in the server market back then.