Maybe I've just been reading too much Respectful Insolence, but I'm going to need a citation to a peer reviewed medical paper for each of those claims. What you wrote reads entirely too much like the sort of pseudoscientific twadddle you find all over the internets - four paragraphs consisting mostly of plausible-sounding but probably ultimately wrong science, with randomly scattered common sense ("Get enough exercise and fresh air") to make it all seem more reasonable.
That was pure luck on Intel's part, though. They'd been pushing for higher and higher GHz, while AMD focused on (and was severely beating them on) the work-per-tick front. That's why AMD CPUs all have the 4800+ or whatever label; in theory, they do the equivalent work of a 4.8 GHz (Pentium) CPU, despite being clocked at only half that. The Pentium 4 series was a dead end, and Intel had no way out.
Then an Intel research group in Israel came up with a heavily modified version of the Pentium 3, the Pentium M. It drew very little power and got a lot of work done. Intel was fortunate enough to see the value of this chip, and threw more of its research budget in along those lines. That's where the Intel Core series came from, and that's what's now whipping AMD's ass.
But if it wasn't for the research group in Israel that had been exploring how far a P3 could go, Intel would still be lagging behind.
I kind of doubt Microsoft has that sort of thing going on anywhere, unless Microsoft Research decides to finally release an actual product. They're stuck on their Pentium 4 - they just keep on pushing a technology that's well beyond any reasonable point of marginal returns.
Whenever some study finds anything, half of Slashdot screams "correlation is not causation!". You're clearly not part of that half.
If the biz section had a downbeat story on the economy, then the political section would have a McCain story.
For the last couple of weeks, all the stories on the economy were downbeat. For the last couple of weeks, a large number of the political stories are about McCain. There's obviously a correlation between which stories are posted, but that doesn't necessarily mean that one is caused by the other.
If the Science section told of some breakthrough, they would run an Obama story in National or Politics.
For the last couple of weeks there's always been Obama (and McCain) stories in political sections. Scientific breakthroughs are somewhat random. Just because they happen at the same time (again) does not mean one is caused by the other.
And as for CNN painting the public mood darker than it really was: I personally thought they got it spot-on. The mood as I saw it was dark in the past few weeks.
I'm not sure if the law is enforceable or if it even has penalties but it is there and Obama claims he is a constitutional lawyer so he should know about it.
Why don't you pay attention to what it says?
(A) all present except those in uniform should stand at attention facing the flag with the right hand over the heart;
It's a recommendation on how you should behave, not a requirement. Just like in an RFC, the difference between "must", and "should" is important.
As far as I know, UCSB doesn't offer an official web design course of any sort. I tried looking through the schedule of classes, but all the CS department offers is things like "Data Structures and Algorithms" and "Introduction to C, C++ and Unix". From what I can remember, the only place where you can actually learn about Flash and HTML are the free classes held intermittently in the computer labs, for which you (of course) get no class credit.
I'm not sure what your friend could have been doing at UCSB to be taking courses that were "more akin software training courses taught at junior colleges or technical colleges like Devry, ITT Tech". Perhaps he is simply very confused?
He's using simulated annealing. The idea is, you start with some state you can get to easily, and then either a) make a random change to the state or b) make a change that tries to improve the state. You have some variable T that determines what percentage of the time you do a. It starts out at some high percent, and then slowly goes down to 0%. The more slowly you decrease T, the closer to optimal your answer is. You can even find optimal solutions to NP complete problems if you let T decrease infinitely slowly.
Basically, this took ten hours per image because he wanted really good results.
A classic example of science journalists who don't have any idea what they're writing about! Ratios of 13C/12C in ocean sediments are used as a proxy of paleoproductivity and a weak proxy of past temperatures. Generally 18O/16O is a better temperature proxy, and is just as easy to obtain. No one really relies on carbon isotopes for anything, except sometimes methane hydrate release. Carbon dating, like figuring out how old something is, is done with 14C/12C, and it is a well known fact that carbon dating is only useful back to 50,000 years ago. Bad science journalism makes me sad inside.
Is one of the extensions you have installed FlashBlock? I was having lots of problems with Firefox 3 behaving badly (pegging my CPU, outright crashing, etc) until I installed that.
Firefox hasn't crashed since, and as a bonus I don't get random banner ads talking to me without warning.
Indeed, the book was published before Harry Potter.
However, this page has a chapter by chapter synopsis and commentary of The Legend of Rah and the Muggles. As far as I can tell, the only thing this book has in common with Harry Potter (aside from some rather standard tropes) is the word "Muggles".
tl;dr version: a software team spends five months optimizing some code, because the server keeps on running out of memory. They manage a 54% reduction in the memory footprint - but the server was running on 512 MB of ram. $60 would have bought them a 2 GB stick.
This is actually my personal theory about why aliens have never visited Earth, the Fermi paradox notwithstanding. Assuming no FTL travel, by the time you've got the technology you need to send ships the dozens of lightyears required to explore new stars, you've already got the technology you need to build colonies in interstellar space. After all, once you can last out there for fifty years, you might as well just set up shop and call it home - nevermind exploring all those distant stars.
It honestly makes me feel kinda sad for him. If you watch the Google Video presentation he gives, his estimate for how much it'll cost to produce a prototype is $500k - so he essentially has to choose between making his prototype or paying his people. The $2 million figure is, I think, to pay a team of five scientists for the six years he estimates it will take to produce a commercially viable prototype.
I looked through the website, and they're very, very vague about what you really have to pay. For one thing, it's 5 books for a dollar each (and one free), but you also pay $13.70 in S&H. That's a pretty good price for six hardcover books, but then you're committed to buying four books from them - and it seems like the books they have mostly aren't new. I tried looking some of them up on Amazon for comparison with their "member prices", but most of the ones I chose apparently weren't for sale any more - except Spook Country, which I knew was new. It's about a dollar more expensive there.
The one thing I can't seem to find without becoming a member is the S&H on the further books you purchase. I wouldn't be surprised if that's a ripoff.
Anyway, it seems like their strategy is to get various interesting-sounding novels for cheap when they stop selling well, and then seed somewhat slightly more popular books in to that.
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
You can't store more than one novel's worth of data in one of those things, and they never have built-in backlights.
I refer you to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Granted, you may not wish to believe the event or the accounts...
And I refer you to Wikipedia. Matthew was written between 70 and 100 AD, Mark was written around 70 AD, Luke was written between 75 and 100 AD, and John was written between 90 and 100 AD.
Jesus died between 26 and 36 AD. That's at least thirty years between the death of Jesus and the writing of these manuscripts. Thirty years is a long ass time. Legends can grow and change tremendously in thirty years.
You know what's kinda funny? If you replacing every instance of "God" in the parent post with "Flying Space Ponies", the logic doesn't change.
And yet, I bet that the parent would say that he doesn't believe in flying space ponies. Why not? The same logic used to say he "[doesn't] NOT believe" applies just as well to flying space ponies.
I feel that the reason why design by contract (DBC from now on) isn't popular is because the entire point of the paradigm is that it doubles or triples your code length without adding any actual information; first, you tell the computer what should be true so you can do what you're going to do, then you tell it what to do, then you tell it what you should have done. That's a lot of typing just to make sure the computer fucks up in exactly the way you told it to.
Admittedly, I haven't programmed much in any language that has built in support for DBC, but from exercises in classes (I'm a CS major) I've found that generally it's sort of a waste of time at worst and a duplication of effort at best.
Regardless, the theory remains: if you can write pre- and postconditions for a function, you already know what the function is supposed to be doing so you might as well have spent your time writing the function and doing something else.
For instance, consider some list class's addElement function, with some (sorta) DBC assertions:
(And I apologize for no indenting, but the tabs got stripped out in preview so I'm assuming they're not there when I post)
Of course, this is an overly simple example and I'm probably not even doing it right; however, hopefully it's close enough that you can see what I mean. All of the assertions are semantically redundant; they don't add any meaning to the code. In fact, I don't think it's possible for that to be true in DBC; if an assertion somehow adds information to the code, it's not an assertion any more.
With konqueror, you can get a wikipedia search with wp, google with gg, debian package, with deb, etc.
You can do that in Firefox as well, and older versions came with something like Google and Wikipedia and IMDB predefined. I'm not sure about the most recent versions, but only because it just imports my bookmarks. In any case, here's how to set up your own: http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/smart-keyw ords.html
Of course, it takes a minute or so for the fire to get hot enough, and maybe another before the magnesium really ignites. By that time, you've probably already called the fire department, so it's unlikely to be a real problem unless you're staring at the thing in awe. Burning magnesium is really bright.
Maybe I'm just a heartless jerk, but I interpreted the "Congratulations, Sony. Nicely done" blurb as "Good job, Sony, you just lost out on that 20,000 yen extra someone was willing to pay for your product" and not "Well done, you made some businessman oppress a homeless dude for a few days".
But then, this is Slashdot. Perhaps Zonk really does think it is Sony's fault that some of their customers aren't nice people.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe I've just been reading too much Respectful Insolence, but I'm going to need a citation to a peer reviewed medical paper for each of those claims. What you wrote reads entirely too much like the sort of pseudoscientific twadddle you find all over the internets - four paragraphs consisting mostly of plausible-sounding but probably ultimately wrong science, with randomly scattered common sense ("Get enough exercise and fresh air") to make it all seem more reasonable.
That was pure luck on Intel's part, though. They'd been pushing for higher and higher GHz, while AMD focused on (and was severely beating them on) the work-per-tick front. That's why AMD CPUs all have the 4800+ or whatever label; in theory, they do the equivalent work of a 4.8 GHz (Pentium) CPU, despite being clocked at only half that. The Pentium 4 series was a dead end, and Intel had no way out.
Then an Intel research group in Israel came up with a heavily modified version of the Pentium 3, the Pentium M. It drew very little power and got a lot of work done. Intel was fortunate enough to see the value of this chip, and threw more of its research budget in along those lines. That's where the Intel Core series came from, and that's what's now whipping AMD's ass.
But if it wasn't for the research group in Israel that had been exploring how far a P3 could go, Intel would still be lagging behind.
I kind of doubt Microsoft has that sort of thing going on anywhere, unless Microsoft Research decides to finally release an actual product. They're stuck on their Pentium 4 - they just keep on pushing a technology that's well beyond any reasonable point of marginal returns.
I can't help but think that this attitude can lead to this conclusion.
Whenever some study finds anything, half of Slashdot screams "correlation is not causation!". You're clearly not part of that half.
For the last couple of weeks, all the stories on the economy were downbeat. For the last couple of weeks, a large number of the political stories are about McCain. There's obviously a correlation between which stories are posted, but that doesn't necessarily mean that one is caused by the other.
For the last couple of weeks there's always been Obama (and McCain) stories in political sections. Scientific breakthroughs are somewhat random. Just because they happen at the same time (again) does not mean one is caused by the other.
And as for CNN painting the public mood darker than it really was: I personally thought they got it spot-on. The mood as I saw it was dark in the past few weeks.
Why don't you pay attention to what it says?
It's a recommendation on how you should behave, not a requirement. Just like in an RFC, the difference between "must", and "should" is important.
As far as I know, UCSB doesn't offer an official web design course of any sort. I tried looking through the schedule of classes, but all the CS department offers is things like "Data Structures and Algorithms" and "Introduction to C, C++ and Unix". From what I can remember, the only place where you can actually learn about Flash and HTML are the free classes held intermittently in the computer labs, for which you (of course) get no class credit.
I'm not sure what your friend could have been doing at UCSB to be taking courses that were "more akin software training courses taught at junior colleges or technical colleges like Devry, ITT Tech". Perhaps he is simply very confused?
He's using simulated annealing. The idea is, you start with some state you can get to easily, and then either a) make a random change to the state or b) make a change that tries to improve the state. You have some variable T that determines what percentage of the time you do a. It starts out at some high percent, and then slowly goes down to 0%. The more slowly you decrease T, the closer to optimal your answer is. You can even find optimal solutions to NP complete problems if you let T decrease infinitely slowly.
Basically, this took ten hours per image because he wanted really good results.
A classic example of science journalists who don't have any idea what they're writing about! Ratios of 13C/12C in ocean sediments are used as a proxy of paleoproductivity and a weak proxy of past temperatures. Generally 18O/16O is a better temperature proxy, and is just as easy to obtain. No one really relies on carbon isotopes for anything, except sometimes methane hydrate release. Carbon dating, like figuring out how old something is, is done with 14C/12C, and it is a well known fact that carbon dating is only useful back to 50,000 years ago. Bad science journalism makes me sad inside.
Is one of the extensions you have installed FlashBlock? I was having lots of problems with Firefox 3 behaving badly (pegging my CPU, outright crashing, etc) until I installed that.
Firefox hasn't crashed since, and as a bonus I don't get random banner ads talking to me without warning.
Indeed, the book was published before Harry Potter.
However, this page has a chapter by chapter synopsis and commentary of The Legend of Rah and the Muggles. As far as I can tell, the only thing this book has in common with Harry Potter (aside from some rather standard tropes) is the word "Muggles".
Indeed, this is the theme of a recent DailyWTF.
tl;dr version: a software team spends five months optimizing some code, because the server keeps on running out of memory. They manage a 54% reduction in the memory footprint - but the server was running on 512 MB of ram. $60 would have bought them a 2 GB stick.
This is actually my personal theory about why aliens have never visited Earth, the Fermi paradox notwithstanding. Assuming no FTL travel, by the time you've got the technology you need to send ships the dozens of lightyears required to explore new stars, you've already got the technology you need to build colonies in interstellar space. After all, once you can last out there for fifty years, you might as well just set up shop and call it home - nevermind exploring all those distant stars.
It honestly makes me feel kinda sad for him. If you watch the Google Video presentation he gives, his estimate for how much it'll cost to produce a prototype is $500k - so he essentially has to choose between making his prototype or paying his people. The $2 million figure is, I think, to pay a team of five scientists for the six years he estimates it will take to produce a commercially viable prototype.
Until he clarified I thought Sony was building these things.
I looked through the website, and they're very, very vague about what you really have to pay. For one thing, it's 5 books for a dollar each (and one free), but you also pay $13.70 in S&H. That's a pretty good price for six hardcover books, but then you're committed to buying four books from them - and it seems like the books they have mostly aren't new. I tried looking some of them up on Amazon for comparison with their "member prices", but most of the ones I chose apparently weren't for sale any more - except Spook Country, which I knew was new. It's about a dollar more expensive there. The one thing I can't seem to find without becoming a member is the S&H on the further books you purchase. I wouldn't be surprised if that's a ripoff. Anyway, it seems like their strategy is to get various interesting-sounding novels for cheap when they stop selling well, and then seed somewhat slightly more popular books in to that.
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame. You can't store more than one novel's worth of data in one of those things, and they never have built-in backlights.
And I refer you to Wikipedia. Matthew was written between 70 and 100 AD, Mark was written around 70 AD, Luke was written between 75 and 100 AD, and John was written between 90 and 100 AD.
Jesus died between 26 and 36 AD. That's at least thirty years between the death of Jesus and the writing of these manuscripts. Thirty years is a long ass time. Legends can grow and change tremendously in thirty years.
You know what's kinda funny? If you replacing every instance of "God" in the parent post with "Flying Space Ponies", the logic doesn't change.
And yet, I bet that the parent would say that he doesn't believe in flying space ponies. Why not? The same logic used to say he "[doesn't] NOT believe" applies just as well to flying space ponies.
Yeah yeah yeah, it's sort of slow, if you screw around with the debugger it dies, but...
They've got Commander Keen!
I feel that the reason why design by contract (DBC from now on) isn't popular is because the entire point of the paradigm is that it doubles or triples your code length without adding any actual information; first, you tell the computer what should be true so you can do what you're going to do, then you tell it what to do, then you tell it what you should have done. That's a lot of typing just to make sure the computer fucks up in exactly the way you told it to.
Admittedly, I haven't programmed much in any language that has built in support for DBC, but from exercises in classes (I'm a CS major) I've found that generally it's sort of a waste of time at worst and a duplication of effort at best.
Regardless, the theory remains: if you can write pre- and postconditions for a function, you already know what the function is supposed to be doing so you might as well have spent your time writing the function and doing something else.
For instance, consider some list class's addElement function, with some (sorta) DBC assertions:
(And I apologize for no indenting, but the tabs got stripped out in preview so I'm assuming they're not there when I post)
Of course, this is an overly simple example and I'm probably not even doing it right; however, hopefully it's close enough that you can see what I mean. All of the assertions are semantically redundant; they don't add any meaning to the code. In fact, I don't think it's possible for that to be true in DBC; if an assertion somehow adds information to the code, it's not an assertion any more.
I for one welcome our new, internet enabled Obama Nation.
Of course, it takes a minute or so for the fire to get hot enough, and maybe another before the magnesium really ignites. By that time, you've probably already called the fire department, so it's unlikely to be a real problem unless you're staring at the thing in awe. Burning magnesium is really bright.
But then, this is Slashdot. Perhaps Zonk really does think it is Sony's fault that some of their customers aren't nice people.