Allegedly, John von Neumann was giving a talk on computers in the late 40s / early 50s. Someone in the audience asked: "But these machines can't really think, can they?" Von Neumann replied: "If you can tell me exactly what it is that a machine cannot do, I can build a machine to do exactly that!"
In New Zealand, some years ago, at the Sky City Casino in Auckland a man was playing the slot machines. He won the jackpot: a new car. He had credits left, so he played again. He won the jackpot again: a second new car.
The casino refused to give him his second car, because the machines were "not supposed to do that".
(I think he took them to court, and may even have won, but it was a while ago, and my google skills are insufficient)
The linux community contains helpful people. It also contains fanboys and elitist snobs. The latter annoy the former almost as much as they annoy newbies...
I wish you good luck finding helpful people if you need help:-)
I can't remember my home phone number -- because I never use it. If someone wants to call me, I give them my cell number. I can certainly remember that.
(other flatmates use the landline, and we need it for internet anyway)
"Suppose you hire one person to clean your home, and it takes five hours, or 300 minutes, for the person to perform each task, one after the other," Vishkin said. "That's analogous to the current serial processing method. Now imagine that you have 100 cleaning people who can work on your home at the same time! That's the parallel processing method."
The kitchen cleaner will grab the bucket and the bathroom cleaner will grab the mop, and neither will be able to get any work done. The rest will be tripping over each other in the hallways, and spend half their time queueing for the toilets...
My question is — if people are breaking the law, why don't the police get involved?
In New Zealand, there was a corruption scandal revolving around one of the government MPs. The government tried to make it go away by holding a narrowly-defined commission of inquiry (which said that the MP had been very silly, but not actually corrupt), but the opposition kept on it. They dug up more evidence, passed it on to the police. The police investigated, decided that there was something there, and they have now moved to press charges against the MP.
(I can't tell you more becuase this is where we're up to at the moment. But I hope they nail the guy.)
So, I get the impression that the police can't charge the president (you have to impeach him?), but what about those lower down? How high up the chain do you have to be before the police can't touch you?
A hotel. A room for four with four strangers. Three of them soon open a bottle of vodka and proceed to get acquainted, then drunk, then noisy, singing and telling political jokes. The fourth one desperately tries to get some sleep; finally, frustrated, he surreptitiously leaves the room, goes downstairs, and asks the lady concierge to bring tea to Room 67 in ten minutes. Then he returns and joins the party. Five minutes later, he bends over an ashtray and says with utter nonchalance: "Comrade Major, some tea to Room 67, please." In a few minutes, there's a knock at the door, and in comes the lady concierge with a tea tray. The room falls silent; the party dies a sudden death, and the conspirator finally gets to sleep. The next morning he wakes up alone in the room. Surprised, he runs downstairs and asks the concierge where his neighbors had gone. "Oh, the KGB has arrested them!" she answers. "B-but... but what about me?" asks the guy in terror. "Oh, well, they decided to let you go. You made Comrade Major laugh a lot with your tea joke."
Seems like the referee would be redundant in such a sport. You may as well let the players referee the game themselves: if you think you've been fouled, signal it and take the ball back.
It wouldn't just destroy Google's revenue source -- it would destroy the revenue sources of every other advertising-supported web site. To figure out if that would affect you, use the following algorithm:
Make a list of all the websites you visit.
Remove those websites you give money to (through a subscription, or through buying their stuff).
Back when I used to watch TV news here in NZ, the standard unit of weight was the "block of butter". Whenever the newsreaders quoted a weight, they would immediately follow it with a conversion to 0.5kg blocks of butter:
"This doodad weighs four kilograms. That's about eight blocks of butter. This other one weighs seven kilograms. That's like fourteen blocks of butter."
You can draw your own conclusions about what they think of their audience...
It brings me to a flash application which lets me experiment with the problem by clicking on doors and then seeing where the prize is. Actually, it doesn't. It gives me two options: I can download a "live version", or I can watch a demo of someone else clicking on doors and seeing where the prize is. Hello? This is flash, it's already interactive! Gah..
..then on that basis the story can either be buried or promoted to the top, where it would be seen by, say, 100,000 people. The elegance of this system is that bad content would only be seen by 100 people on average before it's buried, whereas good content would be seen by all the 100,000 people who view it on the front page, so the average user sees 1,000 pieces of good content for every 1 piece of crap.
Let's say the digg front page shows n good stories and m random unrated stories in the sidebar. If the overwhelming majority of unrated stories are crap then you get m crap for every n good. Simple. If the proportion of good stories amongst unrated is higher, you multiply the proportion by m and separate out the bits. But it's still not gonna be 1000:1 good:crap.
Basically, Hasselton has his numbers mixed up. Good content will (assuming the scheme works) be seen by 1000 times as many users as bad content. But there is so much bad content that users still see plenty of it -- it's just that they're all reading _different_ bad content.
See also: the Archive Comparison Test. Covers 162 different archivers over a bunch of different file types.
It hasn't been updated in a while (5 years), but have the algorithms in popular use changed much? I remember caring about compression algorithms when I was downloading stuff from BBSs at 2400 baud, or trading software with friends on 3.5" floppies. But in these days of broadband, cheap writable CDs, and USB storage, does anyone care about squeezing the last few bytes out of an archive? zip/gzip/bzip2 are good enough for most people for most uses.
The BBC article reports that the colour barcodes can encode up to "3500 characters" worth of information. They also include a screenshot. The screenshot has 11 rows of 24 triangles. Each triangle is one of four colours. So that gives you 2 bits per triangle, 264 triangles, for 528 bits of information in total.
Anyone know where the BBC got the "3500 characters" line from?
Slashdot Mirror
Allegedly, John von Neumann was giving a talk on computers in the late 40s / early 50s. Someone in the audience asked: "But these machines can't really think, can they?" Von Neumann replied: "If you can tell me exactly what it is that a machine cannot do, I can build a machine to do exactly that!"
Nah, they'll just be teaming up with McDonalds on marketing.
If your Nano did wireless synching, you'd be charging it more often than every two weeks...
In New Zealand, some years ago, at the Sky City Casino in Auckland a man was playing the slot machines. He won the jackpot: a new car. He had credits left, so he played again. He won the jackpot again: a second new car.
The casino refused to give him his second car, because the machines were "not supposed to do that".
(I think he took them to court, and may even have won, but it was a while ago, and my google skills are insufficient)
1985--1989?
(oh, wait, you said "successful")
The Bourne Shell must get some kind of mention here. What do you do if you prefer ALGOL to C? Why, #define your own syntax, and thus turn boring old C code into a thing of beauty.
The linux community contains helpful people. It also contains fanboys and elitist snobs. The latter annoy the former almost as much as they annoy newbies...
I wish you good luck finding helpful people if you need help :-)
I can't remember my home phone number -- because I never use it. If someone wants to call me, I give them my cell number. I can certainly remember that.
(other flatmates use the landline, and we need it for internet anyway)
Check out Dasher some time -- quick, efficient mouse-based text input.
(it has limitations -- you'd struggle to program with it -- but it's pretty cool)
The kitchen cleaner will grab the bucket and the bathroom cleaner will grab the mop, and neither will be able to get any work done. The rest will be tripping over each other in the hallways, and spend half their time queueing for the toilets...
Yeah, when I was at uni, I didn't trust the 9-5 types either..
My question is — if people are breaking the law, why don't the police get involved?
In New Zealand, there was a corruption scandal revolving around one of the government MPs. The government tried to make it go away by holding a narrowly-defined commission of inquiry (which said that the MP had been very silly, but not actually corrupt), but the opposition kept on it. They dug up more evidence, passed it on to the police. The police investigated, decided that there was something there, and they have now moved to press charges against the MP.
(I can't tell you more becuase this is where we're up to at the moment. But I hope they nail the guy.)
So, I get the impression that the police can't charge the president (you have to impeach him?), but what about those lower down? How high up the chain do you have to be before the police can't touch you?
Nokia have released a python build for their Series 60 Symbian smartphones. Could you do it with that?
I haven't played with python on my Nokia, but they do provide libraries for phone functions.
And, heck, you can download VOIP apps for Symbian (for when you're connected to open WIFI networks), so it doesn't seem automatically impossible..
That reminds me of a joke I read on Wikipedia's article on Russian political humour:
A hotel. A room for four with four strangers. Three of them soon open a bottle of vodka and proceed to get acquainted, then drunk, then noisy, singing and telling political jokes. The fourth one desperately tries to get some sleep; finally, frustrated, he surreptitiously leaves the room, goes downstairs, and asks the lady concierge to bring tea to Room 67 in ten minutes. Then he returns and joins the party. Five minutes later, he bends over an ashtray and says with utter nonchalance: "Comrade Major, some tea to Room 67, please." In a few minutes, there's a knock at the door, and in comes the lady concierge with a tea tray. The room falls silent; the party dies a sudden death, and the conspirator finally gets to sleep. The next morning he wakes up alone in the room. Surprised, he runs downstairs and asks the concierge where his neighbors had gone. "Oh, the KGB has arrested them!" she answers. "B-but... but what about me?" asks the guy in terror. "Oh, well, they decided to let you go. You made Comrade Major laugh a lot with your tea joke."
Seems like the referee would be redundant in such a sport. You may as well let the players referee the game themselves: if you think you've been fouled, signal it and take the ball back.
...oh, wait. That sounds familiar.
Yeah! The false positive rates will be so high the government will have no choice but to kill the programme! It'll be just like the no-fly list!
I was going to say that...
Just about every CD/DVD retailer in New Zealand does that already.
Everyone knows that R2D2 is the true hero of Star Wars..
If we brought back a trillion bucks' worth of gold, would it still be worth that much?
It wouldn't just destroy Google's revenue source -- it would destroy the revenue sources of every other advertising-supported web site. To figure out if that would affect you, use the following algorithm:
Back when I used to watch TV news here in NZ, the standard unit of weight was the "block of butter". Whenever the newsreaders quoted a weight, they would immediately follow it with a conversion to 0.5kg blocks of butter:
"This doodad weighs four kilograms. That's about eight blocks of butter. This other one weighs seven kilograms. That's like fourteen blocks of butter."
You can draw your own conclusions about what they think of their audience...
I clicked on the Demonstration Project link, then browsed through the list of demos and decided to try the Monty Hall Problem demo.
It brings me to a flash application which lets me experiment with the problem by clicking on doors and then seeing where the prize is. Actually, it doesn't. It gives me two options: I can download a "live version", or I can watch a demo of someone else clicking on doors and seeing where the prize is. Hello? This is flash, it's already interactive! Gah..
Let's say the digg front page shows n good stories and m random unrated stories in the sidebar. If the overwhelming majority of unrated stories are crap then you get m crap for every n good. Simple. If the proportion of good stories amongst unrated is higher, you multiply the proportion by m and separate out the bits. But it's still not gonna be 1000:1 good:crap.
Basically, Hasselton has his numbers mixed up. Good content will (assuming the scheme works) be seen by 1000 times as many users as bad content. But there is so much bad content that users still see plenty of it -- it's just that they're all reading _different_ bad content.
See also: the Archive Comparison Test. Covers 162 different archivers over a bunch of different file types.
It hasn't been updated in a while (5 years), but have the algorithms in popular use changed much? I remember caring about compression algorithms when I was downloading stuff from BBSs at 2400 baud, or trading software with friends on 3.5" floppies. But in these days of broadband, cheap writable CDs, and USB storage, does anyone care about squeezing the last few bytes out of an archive? zip/gzip/bzip2 are good enough for most people for most uses.
The BBC article reports that the colour barcodes can encode up to "3500 characters" worth of information. They also include a screenshot. The screenshot has 11 rows of 24 triangles. Each triangle is one of four colours. So that gives you 2 bits per triangle, 264 triangles, for 528 bits of information in total.
Anyone know where the BBC got the "3500 characters" line from?