Whatever. They offloaded what looked like a menial task to some low-level programmer, who ran it a few times, saw it was "random" (without doing any statistical tests), and went home happy. He probably should have known the Knuth shuffle algorithm -- I remember studying it in high school CS, even -- but honestly it's not that huge a deal.
Ages ago i came up with a probability funnel/cone drawing that shows this. Draw a square, draw a funnel/cone shape that is closed at one end and all the way open at the other. Held with the opening to the right you see the range of possibilities growing over time. This is like trying to predict the weather further and further out.
Sounds like the Lyapunov exponent in chaos/dynamical-systems theory (which measures how sensitivity to initial conditions grows in time).
The thermodynamics-ish idea is that there are more configurations where people are "evenly distributed," so that if you pick a configuration in a uniformly random way, you're more likely to get one of these.
E.g., say you've got a 10x10 grid, and five pennies, and you can put one or more pennies in each grid cell. Furthermore, let's say that we'll define an equivalence relation, so that the order in which pennies are stacked on a cell doesn't matter for configuration counting purposes. Then there are only 100 ways in which all the pennies can be in the same cell, out of 100^5 total configurations.
Still, I am deeply uneasy about the philosophical connections between the mathematical objects we call random variables (which are really completely deterministic) and reality... But nevermind that...
Ditto. Damn near all of (undergrad!) electrical engineering (outside of digital logic stuff) is built around Fourier/Laplace transforms, thanks to the convolution theorem...
Nearly any commercial game? Granted, there are a few good OSS games you could install from the package manager, but suggesting that that would be a solution is just silly...
CNN video huh? Playing it right now using OpenSuse, and Firefox, with a flash player installed, thats it. (1-click install easy as pie)
I'm glad the Linux flash player works on your machine, and runs at reasonable speeds. It did not on my machine (many others with nvidia cards from the same era have also reported problems). Works fine in XP.
And that's the point. There's a long list of things that "sort of" worked under Linux: wifi, power management, Flash... and all those things work perfectly in Windows.
Completely with you. There was a time when I would have considered installing Linux on my older parents' computer, but I wouldn't think seriously about it nowadays. In fact, I've even given up on Linux on the desktop myself!
I'd been running Kubuntu on my laptop for some time... Frustrated by a dog-slow Flash player (which wouldn't fullscreen properly), and extremely flaky wifi, I switched to XP Pro. Should have done it ages ago. It runs Flash fullscreen at native (very high) LCD resolution, plays games, has 100% working, reliable wifi... and nearly everything I'd want Linux for, Cygwin gives me. Plus, you can snag Windows binaries for most OSS software of any note.
And I should emphasize: It runs about twice as fast now. KDE3.5 is slow compared to XP Pro. It's on par with Vista, seriously.
The only time I found XP to be less convenient was when, once, I wanted to access a hard drive as a block device (instead of as a filesystem) so that I could wipe it before returning it. I ended up popping Knoppix in to do that.
That one case is the rare exception.
I still run Kubuntu on a machine in my lab -- which I use only for MATLAB, LaTeX, web, and email -- and it does the job there, but frankly for that purpose it's no better than a Windows machine; it's merely more-or-less the same.
I've also had bad experiences with embedded Linux for realtime applications (It's... nontrivial.... to get realtime support.) So I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that Linux is a good choice if you want a non-realtime embedded system (e.g., router or set-top box), or an extremely capable server. But on the desktop it's just penny-wise and pound foolish.
Dude; it's just Jacobi iteration applied to a particular, reasonably intuitive model. This isn't to knock it -- just to say that it was probably easier to reinvent it than to find some obscure paper --- especially one which probably isn't in the electronic databases.
Is it possible that this is the inevitable result of hypercompetition?
It is, from everything I can tell, hell to be in the Indian job (or education) market. There are simply so many applicants for jobs, or for places in school, that a great deal of "certification" or "education" is really just about failing as many people as possible to bring the numbers down to a level that doesn't completely overwhelm the HR/admissions people.
(It's a reason why so many Indians leave India for other job markets.)
So you find an emphasis on the part of those doing the choosing-of-people on impossible exams and rote learning; and you find an emphasis on the part of the test-takers on blind memorization and cramming (because creativity isn't rewarded: You can grade 80 people for creativity, not 5000. Then you get what you measure.).
It has been argued that there is a degree of competition which is actually harmful to markets -- one in which companies (or individuals) perceive that they have no breathing room for risk-taking or creativity. In industry, this means slashed R&D budgets and technological stagnation; in job markets perhaps it creates the situation you describe of copy&paste "programmers."
I saw an interview with a woman who'd been in a Max Hardcore film. She said she'd been in other porn, more-or-less enjoyed the work, and assumed that working for M. H. would be similar. So she started shooting a film for him, but things got more brutal than she expected, more quickly than she could really understand how to react. Apparently it was a bad enough experience to convince her to leave the industry for good.
I wasn't there and I didn't see the video so I don't know how all this went down. But I can imagine scenarios where someone agrees to shoot a porn but then things get out of control while they're in a vulnerable position. Still, as you said, it seems to me that the real crime is not the filming of this or the distribution of the film ("obscenity"); it's the treatment of the woman (assault/rape).
As an aside, I don't really understand this trend in super-hard-core porn... On the one hand, "to each his own," but on the other... not even the men in this stuff find it pleasant; they're all popping Viagra just to keep themselves going, gritting their teeth, and hoping for it to be over soon themselves...
But that's the problem with the First Amendment, isn't it? If you defend it you end up siding with unsavory characters; if you don't then it's permanently eroded; you're dammed either way.
Joke? Anyway, since forever; just not for the consumer market since Apple jumped ship for Intel a few years back. They make very fast, very expensive server chips.
My university switched this year from vanilla unprotected WMVs for course videos to Silverlight videos served by an on-demand streaming server (from which video cannot easily be downloaded as a file). On the surface (and also in practice for me) it's a dumb move, and a pain in the ass, but one can understand why they did it; it gave them a way to integrate the videos with course slides and synchronize them (still, I'd prefer plain video). All that said, the point I'm getting at is that, to my astonishment, this works perfectly fine under Moonlight. I was shocked. Hell, it's better than Flash on Linux.
Yeah, and I guess it's all just how you look at it anyway. You could easily "geometrize" the "free vs bulldozer miles" point by adding another "vehicle" dimension and embuing different points with different metrics.
Second, let me correct myself: You wouldn't see the back of your head if you lived on a torus (with probability 1). The topology I really wanted for that example was real projective space.
...eeeehhhhhh..... not exactly. What is space? How do you measure distance?
As far as physics currently understands (and I understand of it), space is (1) not Euclidean, and (2) intimately tied up with forces -- especially gravity. How do you separate these things? It's not as simple as you suggest!
We know something about the local curvature of space. But what about its topology? Are we in fact living in a 3-torus (the surface of a donut is a 2-torus), so that if we build a powerful enough telescope eventually we'll see the back of our own heads?
That said, maybe I've just been lucky, but this hasn't really been a problem for me.*
At any rate, these "copy-protected CDs" just contain an extra data track with trojans right? The audio tracks are still plain old redbook audio, no? So you only have problems with (1) Windows machines with Autorun on, and (2) players that can't skip data tracks, right? Practically this doesn't seem like a huge problem.
It's still a dick move by the publisher, though, and I'd like to avoid supporting this behavior by purchasing these malware-infested CDs.
* I do have one CD that has given me some problems, but it does not seem to contain any malware; the data track just has album art.
Bluray and (Disney) DVD is much more of a Spy vs. Spy thing when it comes to DRM
Yeah, I refuse to get on the Blu-Ray bandwagon. Any format that requires a Java VM on the player just to unlock it -- and which must be "updated" by dialing home -- will never receive my support. I need an Internet connection just to play a Blu-Ray? No thanks.
I was at a friend's place a few weeks back and he wanted to show me a new Blu-Ray movie he'd bought. It wouldn't work, because he needed to "update" his player... This wasn't convenient to do at the time since we didn't feel like dismantling his A/V setup and carrying his player to an Ethernet jack, so we gave up and watched something else. He'd have been much better off with a DVD; the quality is good enough, I say.
Paying for a demo is just ridiculous. Requiring each player to have his own copy for LAN play is less absurd, but still not good for anyone. Remember how Starcraft -- the first one -- was demoed? There was a free demo which offered a one or two mission Terran campaign (IIRC), and Battle.net play against other demo players(!). And the full version allowed you to install a "multiplayer spawn" version on other machines, whose almost sole purpose was LAN parties. And you know what? People bought the game! In droves!
A lot of porn online is DRM free, so why so much porn in BitTorrent?
People are embarrassed to be associated with porn -- they don't want it showing up on their credit card bill, or to be seen purchasing it -- whereas a subscription to Netflix or one of the music stores causes them no embarrassment at all.
I know you're joking (yeah, ok, most BT traffic probably is "piracy"), but my only recent use of the protocol was to download Knoppix; it seems they can't afford all the bandwidth to serve ISOs directly (unless you pay a small fee), so they've turned to Bittorrent... Precisely its intended use!
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Whatever. They offloaded what looked like a menial task to some low-level programmer, who ran it a few times, saw it was "random" (without doing any statistical tests), and went home happy. He probably should have known the Knuth shuffle algorithm -- I remember studying it in high school CS, even -- but honestly it's not that huge a deal.
Can it really? I can't come up with an example where this would occur with nonzero probability...
Ages ago i came up with a probability funnel/cone drawing that shows this. Draw a square, draw a funnel/cone shape that is closed at one end and all the way open at the other. Held with the opening to the right you see the range of possibilities growing over time. This is like trying to predict the weather further and further out.
Sounds like the Lyapunov exponent in chaos/dynamical-systems theory (which measures how sensitivity to initial conditions grows in time).
The thermodynamics-ish idea is that there are more configurations where people are "evenly distributed," so that if you pick a configuration in a uniformly random way, you're more likely to get one of these.
E.g., say you've got a 10x10 grid, and five pennies, and you can put one or more pennies in each grid cell. Furthermore, let's say that we'll define an equivalence relation, so that the order in which pennies are stacked on a cell doesn't matter for configuration counting purposes. Then there are only 100 ways in which all the pennies can be in the same cell, out of 100^5 total configurations.
Still, I am deeply uneasy about the philosophical connections between the mathematical objects we call random variables (which are really completely deterministic) and reality... But nevermind that...
I am giving it a 50% chance you have broadcom based wifi card?
That would be correct.
Ditto. Damn near all of (undergrad!) electrical engineering (outside of digital logic stuff) is built around Fourier/Laplace transforms, thanks to the convolution theorem...
most of the people I know that have gone on to high level math (>>Calc 3) tend not to be terribly good at doing basic math in their heads
For your statistics: "Me too!"
Game? What game?
Nearly any commercial game? Granted, there are a few good OSS games you could install from the package manager, but suggesting that that would be a solution is just silly...
CNN video huh? Playing it right now using OpenSuse, and Firefox, with a flash player installed, thats it. (1-click install easy as pie)
I'm glad the Linux flash player works on your machine, and runs at reasonable speeds. It did not on my machine (many others with nvidia cards from the same era have also reported problems). Works fine in XP.
And that's the point. There's a long list of things that "sort of" worked under Linux: wifi, power management, Flash... and all those things work perfectly in Windows.
Completely with you. There was a time when I would have considered installing Linux on my older parents' computer, but I wouldn't think seriously about it nowadays. In fact, I've even given up on Linux on the desktop myself!
I'd been running Kubuntu on my laptop for some time... Frustrated by a dog-slow Flash player (which wouldn't fullscreen properly), and extremely flaky wifi, I switched to XP Pro. Should have done it ages ago. It runs Flash fullscreen at native (very high) LCD resolution, plays games, has 100% working, reliable wifi... and nearly everything I'd want Linux for, Cygwin gives me. Plus, you can snag Windows binaries for most OSS software of any note.
And I should emphasize: It runs about twice as fast now. KDE3.5 is slow compared to XP Pro. It's on par with Vista, seriously.
The only time I found XP to be less convenient was when, once, I wanted to access a hard drive as a block device (instead of as a filesystem) so that I could wipe it before returning it. I ended up popping Knoppix in to do that.
That one case is the rare exception.
I still run Kubuntu on a machine in my lab -- which I use only for MATLAB, LaTeX, web, and email -- and it does the job there, but frankly for that purpose it's no better than a Windows machine; it's merely more-or-less the same.
I've also had bad experiences with embedded Linux for realtime applications (It's... nontrivial.... to get realtime support.) So I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that Linux is a good choice if you want a non-realtime embedded system (e.g., router or set-top box), or an extremely capable server. But on the desktop it's just penny-wise and pound foolish.
Dude; it's just Jacobi iteration applied to a particular, reasonably intuitive model. This isn't to knock it -- just to say that it was probably easier to reinvent it than to find some obscure paper --- especially one which probably isn't in the electronic databases.
Is it possible that this is the inevitable result of hypercompetition?
It is, from everything I can tell, hell to be in the Indian job (or education) market. There are simply so many applicants for jobs, or for places in school, that a great deal of "certification" or "education" is really just about failing as many people as possible to bring the numbers down to a level that doesn't completely overwhelm the HR/admissions people.
(It's a reason why so many Indians leave India for other job markets.)
So you find an emphasis on the part of those doing the choosing-of-people on impossible exams and rote learning; and you find an emphasis on the part of the test-takers on blind memorization and cramming (because creativity isn't rewarded: You can grade 80 people for creativity, not 5000. Then you get what you measure.).
It has been argued that there is a degree of competition which is actually harmful to markets -- one in which companies (or individuals) perceive that they have no breathing room for risk-taking or creativity. In industry, this means slashed R&D budgets and technological stagnation; in job markets perhaps it creates the situation you describe of copy&paste "programmers."
When you put it that way, Wikipedia starts to sound like an open, crowdsourced Yahoo on steroids.
Troll, Insightful?
IBM makes consumer processors. You will find them in the XBOX 360, Wii and PS 3.
Ack! Yes! How'd I forget about that?!
I saw an interview with a woman who'd been in a Max Hardcore film. She said she'd been in other porn, more-or-less enjoyed the work, and assumed that working for M. H. would be similar. So she started shooting a film for him, but things got more brutal than she expected, more quickly than she could really understand how to react. Apparently it was a bad enough experience to convince her to leave the industry for good.
I wasn't there and I didn't see the video so I don't know how all this went down. But I can imagine scenarios where someone agrees to shoot a porn but then things get out of control while they're in a vulnerable position. Still, as you said, it seems to me that the real crime is not the filming of this or the distribution of the film ("obscenity"); it's the treatment of the woman (assault/rape).
As an aside, I don't really understand this trend in super-hard-core porn... On the one hand, "to each his own," but on the other... not even the men in this stuff find it pleasant; they're all popping Viagra just to keep themselves going, gritting their teeth, and hoping for it to be over soon themselves...
But that's the problem with the First Amendment, isn't it? If you defend it you end up siding with unsavory characters; if you don't then it's permanently eroded; you're dammed either way.
Joke? Anyway, since forever; just not for the consumer market since Apple jumped ship for Intel a few years back. They make very fast, very expensive server chips.
My university switched this year from vanilla unprotected WMVs for course videos to Silverlight videos served by an on-demand streaming server (from which video cannot easily be downloaded as a file). On the surface (and also in practice for me) it's a dumb move, and a pain in the ass, but one can understand why they did it; it gave them a way to integrate the videos with course slides and synchronize them (still, I'd prefer plain video). All that said, the point I'm getting at is that, to my astonishment, this works perfectly fine under Moonlight. I was shocked. Hell, it's better than Flash on Linux.
Yeah, and I guess it's all just how you look at it anyway. You could easily "geometrize" the "free vs bulldozer miles" point by adding another "vehicle" dimension and embuing different points with different metrics.
Second, let me correct myself: You wouldn't see the back of your head if you lived on a torus (with probability 1). The topology I really wanted for that example was real projective space.
...eeeehhhhhh..... not exactly. What is space? How do you measure distance?
As far as physics currently understands (and I understand of it), space is (1) not Euclidean, and (2) intimately tied up with forces -- especially gravity. How do you separate these things? It's not as simple as you suggest!
We know something about the local curvature of space. But what about its topology? Are we in fact living in a 3-torus (the surface of a donut is a 2-torus), so that if we build a powerful enough telescope eventually we'll see the back of our own heads?
Space, and distance, may be kind of complicated!
Hmm, good point; thanks for the heads up.
That said, maybe I've just been lucky, but this hasn't really been a problem for me.*
At any rate, these "copy-protected CDs" just contain an extra data track with trojans right? The audio tracks are still plain old redbook audio, no? So you only have problems with (1) Windows machines with Autorun on, and (2) players that can't skip data tracks, right? Practically this doesn't seem like a huge problem.
It's still a dick move by the publisher, though, and I'd like to avoid supporting this behavior by purchasing these malware-infested CDs.
* I do have one CD that has given me some problems, but it does not seem to contain any malware; the data track just has album art.
Bluray and (Disney) DVD is much more of a Spy vs. Spy thing when it comes to DRM
Yeah, I refuse to get on the Blu-Ray bandwagon. Any format that requires a Java VM on the player just to unlock it -- and which must be "updated" by dialing home -- will never receive my support. I need an Internet connection just to play a Blu-Ray? No thanks.
I was at a friend's place a few weeks back and he wanted to show me a new Blu-Ray movie he'd bought. It wouldn't work, because he needed to "update" his player... This wasn't convenient to do at the time since we didn't feel like dismantling his A/V setup and carrying his player to an Ethernet jack, so we gave up and watched something else. He'd have been much better off with a DVD; the quality is good enough, I say.
Call me old fashioned, but I buy CDs. That works on Linux! You get lossless, DRM-free music, and physical media which, unlike CDRs, do not degrade.
Paying for a demo is just ridiculous. Requiring each player to have his own copy for LAN play is less absurd, but still not good for anyone. Remember how Starcraft -- the first one -- was demoed? There was a free demo which offered a one or two mission Terran campaign (IIRC), and Battle.net play against other demo players(!). And the full version allowed you to install a "multiplayer spawn" version on other machines, whose almost sole purpose was LAN parties. And you know what? People bought the game! In droves!
Oh, the good old days...
A lot of porn online is DRM free, so why so much porn in BitTorrent?
People are embarrassed to be associated with porn -- they don't want it showing up on their credit card bill, or to be seen purchasing it -- whereas a subscription to Netflix or one of the music stores causes them no embarrassment at all.
I know you're joking (yeah, ok, most BT traffic probably is "piracy"), but my only recent use of the protocol was to download Knoppix; it seems they can't afford all the bandwidth to serve ISOs directly (unless you pay a small fee), so they've turned to Bittorrent... Precisely its intended use!