As much as I hate advertising, this is probably a bad sign. Companies won't do less advertising - it works too well, but at least on CNET we know where (most of?) the ads are. Who is sponsoring this or that tech blog? We've already seen "scandals" like that, although blogs are mostly not journalism. It is probably a lot cheaper and effective to buy out a few blogs and get consistent long term shilling than it is to buy recognizable ads on a bigger site. It has consistently been safe to predict that in the future we will be subject to more and more marketing that is more pervasive and less recognizable than ever before. It never seems to end.
So what, you can't hold the government accountable for violations of the fourth amendment unless you can somehow prove harm ? How would you even know if harm occurred ? And just what is the point of having a constitution anyway if no one is or can be held accountable for disregarding it ?
I don't get it. You don't trust banks, but you trust the Federal Reserve ? The people who can and do print money like it grows on trees and in cotton fields ?
Although the new Santa Rosa chipsets make the MacBook less competitive than it was before, overall it is still a good value. For a while there was almost no competition if you wanted a 5 lb. Core 2 Duo laptop w/ 4MB of L2.
Disney and the other corporations will simply buy the public domain. What was once a public resource will be auctioned off to the highest bidder and people will have to pay. Apparently, denying everyone access to something creates economic value (if you ignore the costs to the public). Sound familiar ? I wonder how long until we will have to pay for the privilege of merely existing in a particular space. All of those roads, sidewalks, and parks could be sold off, and we could implant chips in people to debit their bank accounts to the owners of that property. You already pay rent, isn't it just an extension of the same thing ?
There's a whole community of people involved in symbolic computation that develop these systems. There are algorithms which produce these results, they are based on real math, and they can be checked. Imagine that you are solving a system of equations. You can plug the solution into those equations to verify it. You can solve the system numerically to check the solution for consistency. You can use the mathematical properties of the solution to verify its correctness.
Computer algebra systems are still immature, and there was a time when much of what they did was simply heuristics, but that is increasingly not the case. There is an entire field dedicated to solving symbolic mathematical problems efficiently on a computer. Where you have to watch out is with commands like "simplify" which are inherently heuristic - although even that is being attacked using rigorous methods.
Generally speaking, when you use a computer algebra system you want it to run an algorithm to compute something. It doesn't matter whether the software is a black box, what matters is whether what it produces is correct and useful. That can be checked.
Re:Isn't everything digital a number?
on
Censoring a Number
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· Score: 1
The line is whether the number represents a creative work. 09F91102 9D74E35B D84156C5 635688C0 is not a creative work, it is just a piece of information that some businesses find it inconvenient for people to know. It was a trade secret. It is not a creative work.
Whether or not you want to learn assembly depends on the kind of software that you want to write. If you are writing "interface" software, where a wide range of functionality from different sources is tied together to accomplish a goal, then assembly language is not really useful. Even if your software needs to be fast, you can probably use C. It is always much more important to optimize the data structures and algorithms used for a program, followed by the cache behavior.
Where assembly language is useful is when you really need to get down to specific instructions. Maybe your C compiler is producing bad code for a critical section, or it can't make use of some optimization because it doesn't know about restrictions on the data. Another situation is when you want to use instructions which have no analogue in your preferred higher level language. For example, say you want to implement a lock-free data structure using compare-and-swap. You will probably have to code some of it in assembly for each platform.
In all honestly, learning assembly should be no big deal. You don't have to be a guru, but it is always helpful to have basic knowledge and skills that you can build on later if you need to. CPU instruction sets aren't going away, and I found it added to my confidence to know that if need be, I could always go right down to the level of machine instructions to bash exactly what I want into the machine.
Nevermind, I figured it out. You need to estimate the median (like quicksort) to parallelize merging to four cores. If anyone still has suggestions for heaps, I'd like to hear it though.
Since the article has nothing, I wanted to ask: has anyone implemented merge sort where you merge from both the front and back using two simultaneous threads ? I haven't seen this anywhere, but it's an obvious improvement for multicore machines. Does anyone know how to further parallelize merging (or for that matter, heaps) ?
I think the problem started when time became a selling point. RPGs started advertising "50+ hours of gameplay", and short games were criticized for being a bad value. Total nonsense. The first Final Fantasy can be thoroughly beaten in less than 20 hours. That's a good amount of time. The Lunar games, which are arguably worth the extended time, take 30-40 hours. Grandia, which is a beast, basically takes 50 hours, however a lot of that extra time is spent in dungeons, specifically one massive optional dungeon.
Not every game is good enough to justify 50 hours of my time. In fact, very few are, and I would prefer to choose whether to spend that time or not (for example, by getting Medusa swords and pink tails) for a game I happen to like. Long games have less replay value, not more.
I regretfully stopped playing Final Fantasy games after FF8, which I couldn't be bothered to finish. The optional side quests in FF7-9 were mostly absurd and stupid affairs. I do not want to breed chocobos for a few hours just to get to some damn island and get a summon. Nor do I want to jump rope, or master some other idiotic game in every town just to get a unique item. It makes me think there should be an option to massacre those idiot NPCs and take their items, which is one of the features I like in Bethesda's games.
The optional feature that seems to be most lacking is opportunities for simple exploration. In most games there were times where you could veer off and find neat things, or get to a later town and talk to people before events happen and maybe buy a more powerful weapon or piece of armor. Simple things that are interesting and take 5-20 minutes to do, and have a simple reward or even no reward that you won't miss if you forget or if you decide not to do it. Later games seemed to forget this mechanic, and for every optional thing there had to be some sort of unique item or benefit just to justify doing it. This made the games feel tedious, especially when you did not have the option to go back and get the items later.
Finally, I think the jump to 3D hurt the genre. Hey you kids - get off my lawn! It took me a long time to realize why I prefer 2D games (except for FPS games, obviously). Two dimensional representations are inherently artistic. You have to draw something, and that takes skill. Having a computer animate a 3 dimensional model lowers the bar dramatically. It becomes harder to appreciate artistic skill, and making a more detailed model and adding lighting effects obscure the artwork, for better or for worse. I want to see art, not technical effects. It is interesting that the opposite happens with 2D graphics, higher resolution makes bad artwork all the more apparent.
To everyone who pointed out that Microsoft has yet to ship Mac Intel binaries: that's hardly the same thing. Vista is an OS upgrade, not an architecture switch.
What a joke. If Microsoft did this with Tiger, Mac fans would howl. Apple is just being sloppy, and the company obviously doesn't care very much about Windows users. PCs are shipping with Vista right now.
I'm sorry but you're wrong. Nikita Khrushchev threatened to use atomic bombs on London and Paris during the Suez Crisis. He was intervening on behalf of Egypt, but it was not the Soviet Union that was under attack, and atomic weapons were otherwise not on the table.
The world is no scarier than it ever was, if anything it's less scary. Look at this list of causes of death. Nowhere on there do I see rampaging hordes of terrorists. Most deaths are due to genetic predispositions to disease or stupidity. In previous centuries you might have seen "executions by a mad king" or "crushed to death while building a pyramid". In foreign countries today, "starvation" or "collateral damage" would be high on the list. Americans are some of the safest people in history.
Consider that during the cold war, your enemy had nuclear weapons and threatened to use them! More than once! Consider that during the second world war western democracies were under attack, not by some rogue bands of extremists, but by large industrial states with real armies and the resources to potentially conquer the world. The entire world could fall under a fascist regime. Now that's a threat!
Of course, during all of this people talked about curtailing freedom of speech, and they actually rounded up a bunch of Japanese americans and put them in camps. Most people (paradoxically) think this was wrong, but what the US government is doing with Guantanemo is far worse. They have already passed a law that will allow the president to throw people into a black hole with no judicial process or review. And those people can be tortured, because the president and the military get to decide what torture is. This is far worse than anything America has done going back to Lincoln, who suspended habeas corpus (it has since been eliminated!) when the confederate army was at his doorstep. Lincoln may have been justified, but Bush is not. There is nowhere near the threat to the United States today. If anything, the biggest threat is the United States government itself, and the people who are so disinterested in politics that they have allowed a tyrant to rule them.
Do these people go outside in the daytime ? Do they not realize that they are being bombarded with radiation if they do ? Radiation that, unlike wifi transmissions, has been proven to cause cancer in humans! This has been your irrational minute.
Their plans certainly do sound zany. They should be looking for places that *have to be hot*, temporarily, before the excess energy is discarded. My house is full of them: dishwasher, oven, washing machine, shower. Assuming warm weather (ie: I don't want to heat my house) the excess heat from these devices could be recycled into more electricity for me. Granted that's not a lot of savings, but the potential of having a chip is that you can put this functionality anywhere at very low cost. I bet commerce and industry is full of examples where a 20 or 30 percent recovery rate would produce worthwhile savings over the lifetime of the device.
Slashdot Mirror
As much as I hate advertising, this is probably a bad sign. Companies won't do less advertising - it works too well, but at least on CNET we know where (most of?) the ads are. Who is sponsoring this or that tech blog? We've already seen "scandals" like that, although blogs are mostly not journalism. It is probably a lot cheaper and effective to buy out a few blogs and get consistent long term shilling than it is to buy recognizable ads on a bigger site. It has consistently been safe to predict that in the future we will be subject to more and more marketing that is more pervasive and less recognizable than ever before. It never seems to end.
So what, you can't hold the government accountable for violations of the fourth amendment unless you can somehow prove harm ? How would you even know if harm occurred ? And just what is the point of having a constitution anyway if no one is or can be held accountable for disregarding it ?
Thanks for telling me what they are, that way I don't read the article.
I don't get it. You don't trust banks, but you trust the Federal Reserve ? The people who can and do print money like it grows on trees and in cotton fields ?
Although the new Santa Rosa chipsets make the MacBook less competitive than it was before, overall it is still a good value. For a while there was almost no competition if you wanted a 5 lb. Core 2 Duo laptop w/ 4MB of L2.
Disney and the other corporations will simply buy the public domain. What was once a public resource will be auctioned off to the highest bidder and people will have to pay. Apparently, denying everyone access to something creates economic value (if you ignore the costs to the public). Sound familiar ? I wonder how long until we will have to pay for the privilege of merely existing in a particular space. All of those roads, sidewalks, and parks could be sold off, and we could implant chips in people to debit their bank accounts to the owners of that property. You already pay rent, isn't it just an extension of the same thing ?
Actually, it is arguably protected under the DMCA, which is a big part of the problem that people have with that law.
There's a whole community of people involved in symbolic computation that develop these systems. There are algorithms which produce these results, they are based on real math, and they can be checked. Imagine that you are solving a system of equations. You can plug the solution into those equations to verify it. You can solve the system numerically to check the solution for consistency. You can use the mathematical properties of the solution to verify its correctness. Computer algebra systems are still immature, and there was a time when much of what they did was simply heuristics, but that is increasingly not the case. There is an entire field dedicated to solving symbolic mathematical problems efficiently on a computer. Where you have to watch out is with commands like "simplify" which are inherently heuristic - although even that is being attacked using rigorous methods.
Generally speaking, when you use a computer algebra system you want it to run an algorithm to compute something. It doesn't matter whether the software is a black box, what matters is whether what it produces is correct and useful. That can be checked.
The line is whether the number represents a creative work. 09F91102 9D74E35B D84156C5 635688C0 is not a creative work, it is just a piece of information that some businesses find it inconvenient for people to know. It was a trade secret. It is not a creative work.
Now we just need the Supreme Court to fix the DMCA and we're all set. On a related note, check out my new tagline.
I use mpg123 and the file system hierarchy to organize and play my mp3s. I have no idea what the hell you kids are talking about.
Whether or not you want to learn assembly depends on the kind of software that you want to write. If you are writing "interface" software, where a wide range of functionality from different sources is tied together to accomplish a goal, then assembly language is not really useful. Even if your software needs to be fast, you can probably use C. It is always much more important to optimize the data structures and algorithms used for a program, followed by the cache behavior.
Where assembly language is useful is when you really need to get down to specific instructions. Maybe your C compiler is producing bad code for a critical section, or it can't make use of some optimization because it doesn't know about restrictions on the data. Another situation is when you want to use instructions which have no analogue in your preferred higher level language. For example, say you want to implement a lock-free data structure using compare-and-swap. You will probably have to code some of it in assembly for each platform.
In all honestly, learning assembly should be no big deal. You don't have to be a guru, but it is always helpful to have basic knowledge and skills that you can build on later if you need to. CPU instruction sets aren't going away, and I found it added to my confidence to know that if need be, I could always go right down to the level of machine instructions to bash exactly what I want into the machine.
95% off ? Does Microsoft actually sell any single license for Office to anyone at ~$1500 US ?
Nevermind, I figured it out. You need to estimate the median (like quicksort) to parallelize merging to four cores. If anyone still has suggestions for heaps, I'd like to hear it though.
Since the article has nothing, I wanted to ask: has anyone implemented merge sort where you merge from both the front and back using two simultaneous threads ? I haven't seen this anywhere, but it's an obvious improvement for multicore machines. Does anyone know how to further parallelize merging (or for that matter, heaps) ?
I think the problem started when time became a selling point. RPGs started advertising "50+ hours of gameplay", and short games were criticized for being a bad value. Total nonsense. The first Final Fantasy can be thoroughly beaten in less than 20 hours. That's a good amount of time. The Lunar games, which are arguably worth the extended time, take 30-40 hours. Grandia, which is a beast, basically takes 50 hours, however a lot of that extra time is spent in dungeons, specifically one massive optional dungeon.
Not every game is good enough to justify 50 hours of my time. In fact, very few are, and I would prefer to choose whether to spend that time or not (for example, by getting Medusa swords and pink tails) for a game I happen to like. Long games have less replay value, not more.
I regretfully stopped playing Final Fantasy games after FF8, which I couldn't be bothered to finish. The optional side quests in FF7-9 were mostly absurd and stupid affairs. I do not want to breed chocobos for a few hours just to get to some damn island and get a summon. Nor do I want to jump rope, or master some other idiotic game in every town just to get a unique item. It makes me think there should be an option to massacre those idiot NPCs and take their items, which is one of the features I like in Bethesda's games.
The optional feature that seems to be most lacking is opportunities for simple exploration. In most games there were times where you could veer off and find neat things, or get to a later town and talk to people before events happen and maybe buy a more powerful weapon or piece of armor. Simple things that are interesting and take 5-20 minutes to do, and have a simple reward or even no reward that you won't miss if you forget or if you decide not to do it. Later games seemed to forget this mechanic, and for every optional thing there had to be some sort of unique item or benefit just to justify doing it. This made the games feel tedious, especially when you did not have the option to go back and get the items later.
Finally, I think the jump to 3D hurt the genre. Hey you kids - get off my lawn! It took me a long time to realize why I prefer 2D games (except for FPS games, obviously). Two dimensional representations are inherently artistic. You have to draw something, and that takes skill. Having a computer animate a 3 dimensional model lowers the bar dramatically. It becomes harder to appreciate artistic skill, and making a more detailed model and adding lighting effects obscure the artwork, for better or for worse. I want to see art, not technical effects. It is interesting that the opposite happens with 2D graphics, higher resolution makes bad artwork all the more apparent.
To everyone who pointed out that Microsoft has yet to ship Mac Intel binaries: that's hardly the same thing. Vista is an OS upgrade, not an architecture switch.
What a joke. If Microsoft did this with Tiger, Mac fans would howl. Apple is just being sloppy, and the company obviously doesn't care very much about Windows users. PCs are shipping with Vista right now.
Just think, with $140M you could buy both, and move the castle TO Sealand. How cool would that be ?
How did this type of crank bullshit get on the BBC ? What's next, an article on the timecube ?!
I'm sorry but you're wrong. Nikita Khrushchev threatened to use atomic bombs on London and Paris during the Suez Crisis. He was intervening on behalf of Egypt, but it was not the Soviet Union that was under attack, and atomic weapons were otherwise not on the table.
The world is no scarier than it ever was, if anything it's less scary. Look at this list of causes of death. Nowhere on there do I see rampaging hordes of terrorists. Most deaths are due to genetic predispositions to disease or stupidity. In previous centuries you might have seen "executions by a mad king" or "crushed to death while building a pyramid". In foreign countries today, "starvation" or "collateral damage" would be high on the list. Americans are some of the safest people in history.
Consider that during the cold war, your enemy had nuclear weapons and threatened to use them! More than once! Consider that during the second world war western democracies were under attack, not by some rogue bands of extremists, but by large industrial states with real armies and the resources to potentially conquer the world. The entire world could fall under a fascist regime. Now that's a threat!
Of course, during all of this people talked about curtailing freedom of speech, and they actually rounded up a bunch of Japanese americans and put them in camps. Most people (paradoxically) think this was wrong, but what the US government is doing with Guantanemo is far worse. They have already passed a law that will allow the president to throw people into a black hole with no judicial process or review. And those people can be tortured, because the president and the military get to decide what torture is. This is far worse than anything America has done going back to Lincoln, who suspended habeas corpus (it has since been eliminated!) when the confederate army was at his doorstep. Lincoln may have been justified, but Bush is not. There is nowhere near the threat to the United States today. If anything, the biggest threat is the United States government itself, and the people who are so disinterested in politics that they have allowed a tyrant to rule them.
Do these people go outside in the daytime ? Do they not realize that they are being bombarded with radiation if they do ? Radiation that, unlike wifi transmissions, has been proven to cause cancer in humans! This has been your irrational minute.
Their plans certainly do sound zany. They should be looking for places that *have to be hot*, temporarily, before the excess energy is discarded. My house is full of them: dishwasher, oven, washing machine, shower. Assuming warm weather (ie: I don't want to heat my house) the excess heat from these devices could be recycled into more electricity for me. Granted that's not a lot of savings, but the potential of having a chip is that you can put this functionality anywhere at very low cost. I bet commerce and industry is full of examples where a 20 or 30 percent recovery rate would produce worthwhile savings over the lifetime of the device.