She wrapped it up with "however, Gore will not appear on the channel himself." Thank god- we've have an epidemic of people falling asleep from Instant Boredom.
Wiley is a counterexample, which proves the statement
You are obviously no mathematician, if you think a counterexample proves a statement...
But I agree mathematics is at its most beautiful when proofs are elegant. Unfortunately, many of the elegant proofs are already discovered; it is the area of inelegant proofs that is still wide open...
Flawed in the sense it can't be peer reviewed to be "proven."
But it can. When the algorithm is published, you can implement it from scratch on a different computer. If humans are peers for humans, doesn't it make sense that computers are peers for computers?
As someone who is versed in about a dozen program languages, but who only tackled Java last year, I can tell you that knowing how to program something in concept and how to do it in Java are two different things. For instance, there were many occassions in my recent past, where I thought: "I know how to do this, I am pretty confident that Java has a standard way of doing this, but how the hell do I find out what that standard way is?"
(Frankly, I also think that Java is overburdened with many standard ways that do the same thing, with only slight differences between them. How am I going to choose between those?)
When I am interested in a concept, I look at a concepts book. When I need to solve a problem in a specific language, I want the code for that language. Translating a concept to a language is not trivial, unfortunately.
I play a _lot_ of games, and I'm pretty sure there's no game out there where you can squat and take a cleveland steamer on someone.
But it would make a fun sequel to Katamari Damacy (sp?). You start as a tiny beetle, who lays tiny little turds, which you try to dump on ants. And you transfer through different stages -- you become a mouse who dumps on beetles, a bird who soils statues, a rabbit who lets people slip on tiny marbles, etc. -- until you reach the final goal: you become a huge mammoth who completely COVERS people in poo! I would play that!
In Randis own book "flim flam" he admits that roughly a third of the cases he looks into he cant explain. He brushes this aside by saying "Oh, I just *KNOW* they are faking it. I just havent figured it out yet".
True, but not knowing how something is done doesn't mean "paranormal" forces are at work. Furthermore, while Randi doesn't always know how "they" do it, very often he can easily replicate the effect in his own way.
Randi set his million dollar prize so that he would be able to investigate claims in controlled circumstances -- which is not normally the case. And in those circumstances, he has never encountered anything out of the ordinary.
And last, even if this is a placebo, the placebo efect in itself is a mystery. Nobody knows how it works and that was the first point of the original article.
Nobody knows how gravity works. But that doesn't make gravity a mystery.
Re:Games HAVE had a drastic effect on a generation
on
Got Game
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Games have had positive and negative effects. My generation, or at least a majority of it's members, has spent years being driven half-insane by puzzles and intellectual challenges both to reasoning and patience.
Hogwash. Nowadays games are meant for almost-instant gratification. A gamer must be able to overcome any challenge quickly, or he will be bored with the game and go on to something else.
I was 20 years of age when I got my C64. Before that time, I did math puzzles for entertainment. The most interesting puzzles took days to solve. The biggest challenge I faced I worked on for three full weeks before being able to solve it.
Then, in the early days of home computing, you had text adventures that took weeks, if not months to solve. I solved the Zork trilogy without assistance, but I worked on them for over two years.
Nowadays, a game is called "challenging", if it contains a situation that takes 10 minutes to solve. As soon as it takes 15, it is called "boring" or "impossible". But hey, there's always a walkthrough, isn't there?
This situation is understandable from a game publisher's point of view. A game won't sell if it is a real challenge. And I think there are many games today that are more entertaining than Zork or math puzzles. For my personal entertainment, I seldom go back to games that are over 10 years old.
But don't tell me today's games teach you tenacity. Rather the opposite, I would say.
Gamer skills vs. the workplace
on
Got Game
·
· Score: 1
Lessons from games that may not work so well in the workplace:
If at first you don't succeed, reload your last save.
Sucking up to your mates may get you the latest warez.
Cheating gets you the highest scores.
It is far more important to beat your latest highscore than eating, sleeping, or bathing.
You can't do any good work without the latest hardware.
If it is not entertaining, it is not worth doing.
Any conversation can be handled by choosing between three clear-cut options.
Most girls have a DD rack, legs up to their armpits, and wear a bikini. Girls that don't should be avoided at all times.
An answer to any difficult problem can be found by searching www.gamefaqs.com.
I can do it in one picture
on
Got Game
·
· Score: 1
"being 27" + "but may never have a chance to climb up that higher in the positions ladder"
You are being ridiculous. If you are not qualified for a job as an executive manager, you'll lose the job soon enough. If you ARE qualified for the job, you'll have plenty of chances to get that job later if you really want it (since you're still in diapers).
The question is, do you have enough money now, do you like your work now, and what are your ambitions?
If your main ambition is to make lots of cash, sure, go for the high-paying job.
If your main ambition is to have fun in your life and in your work, think it over really hard.
I read in a book (which I don't have near me now) about Richard Garriott designing the Ultima games. After he did Ultima III, he discovered that some people spent dozens or even hundreds of hours in his games. Then he thought, that in that time, basically, he had an opportunity to shape people's thoughts. By that, he did not mean that he could brainwash people into becoming his slaves, but that he should carefully consider what he would put in the game. He then designed Ultima IV, which is, as the slightly older gaming-generation knows, a game that centers around the concept of virtues.
An interesting story about that in the same book was about one of the rooms in a dungeon. Due to the engine, all creatures in a dungeon were enemies: you couldn't converse with them. Garriot had 256 special rooms, each taking op one screen. While filling these rooms, he was looking for interesting sprites to use. He had already filled two-hundred rooms with demons, zombies, dragons, and other critters, when he noticed a sprite he used in the villages, of a child. So he created a dungeon room consisting of cells, with a child in each cell. The player could simply walk through the room, not being bothered by the cells, but he had the ability to pull a lever and open the cell doors. The thing is, that after the player did that, the children were released and would attack the player -- they were monsters, because the game could only have monsters in dungeons.
When the game was betatested, one beta-tester found this room, and was outraged. He sent angry letters that Garriott's new game required the killing of children. He even approached Garriott's parents, asking them if they could talk to their son, which they did. Garriott argued that the game didn't require killing children at all: you didn't need to go through this room, you didn't need to open the cells, and even if you did, you didn't need to kill the children -- you could put them to sleep, or just ignore them. His parents argued that it was just one room, and it wasn't important, so why wouldn't he take it out. But that only convinced Garriott more that the room should stay in. He knew many players wouldn't care, and would happily kill the children, but a few might be facing a moral dilemma, where they were hindered by the children, but didn't want to kill them. And that was exactly what Garriott wanted to achieve with Ultima IV, that players would THINK about their actions.
All in the 1980s...
Re:Requirements?
on
QA != Testing
·
· Score: 1, Funny
At my job, requirements are often one-sentence requests with no needed detail whatsoever.
Reminds me of my first programming job. For five years I worked for a boss, who only drew screenshots and then said: "Program this".
You are wrong. Punishments don't help, rewards do.
You should turn your idea around and give a cash reward every month to users who have NOT been infected by adware. There should be a certain amount of money available each month, which is divided among the users that get the reward.
To keep users interested in this program, they should all run a small app that constantly keeps a window open and displays how many PCs on the network are not effected yet, so they can calculate at any time how much money they are going to get (or will fail to get if they get infected).
Implementing this app should be simple: it just runs a systems check every ten minutes, and transmits the gathered information to a central server. The sysadmin then send regular updates.
But such a reward costs money, you will say. No worries! The same app can simply display ads. I hear many companies are interested in displaying ads on users' monitors. It could even result in a positive cash-flow.
How well do the different Bone books translate to adventure games? I see problems here. For instance, the first two books basically are humorous stories with some serious stuff thrown in. The latter books are very dark and deeply serious. I'd say the first books are easier to translate to a game than the last books.
Furthermore, I think they will have serious problems selling the later games. The interview says they are planning NINE adventures, each based on one of the books. But the books are so closely intertwined, that the public for the games will dwindle away when some people fail to play one game, and thus cannot get into the next games anymore. I expect that by the time book five is reached, the public will be gone, especially since Master of the Eastern Border is a low point in the Bone series (mind you, it is still far better than most of the trash out there, but for Bone this is not a very interesting part of the story).
And then you have the problem that the story is so complex and convoluted, that you easily forget things that happened. Every time a new Bone book was published, I read the books which came before it before tackling the new one. However, I do not intend to replay eight Bone GAMES before tackling the ninth one.
Maybe, if they stick really close to the books, they can deliver each game with the comics that preceded it?
Quite agree, it's about the algorithm, not about the code.
One of the finest moments in my programming career was when my boss asked me to see if I could gain a speed improvement in a program that surveyed a huge datastore and generated volumes of text from it. This program had to run once a month, and deliver its result in the same month. The program that was originally written, unfortunately, took three months to run (it started out OK, but the data store had grown considerably). They had asked one of our "best programmers" to create a faster version of the program. He did that by reprogramming the entire thing in assembly (you may now understand why managers thought he was one of the best programmers). It took him six whole months to finish the new version. The resulting program completed the task in just about one month. However, my boss was afraid that when the datastore would grow a bit more, we would again be in trouble. That's when he asked me to look it over. I started by investigating the problem, which at first glance looked like a network traversing problem. I soon realised it could be solved by a nested matrix multiplication (which is, of course, a standard way to discover paths in a network). It was a matrix with about a million rows and columns, but since it contained only zeroes and ones (with a couple of thousands times more zeroes than ones), the multiplication was easy to implement in a fast way. Within half-a-day, I had built a prototype program in a high-level language which did the whole job in a few hours.
While I am still pleased with this result, I really think it came off so well not because I was so smart, but because the assembly programmer was not really worthy of the name. Still, I often use this as an illustration for students who are writing illegible code and argue that it is so very fast.
The priority date (the date from which your patent is taken to have been submitted) is taken as the first submission to any patent office in any country in which you applied.
True, but if the patent isn't accepted in Belgium as valid, then the patent is worthless in Belgium, even if it is accepted in the US. Only if Belgium accepts the patent, the priority date becomes an issue.
but how about we Europeans just ignore everything the US says law wise, treat their patents as null and void,
Basically, US patents ARE null and void in the EU. They only hold in the US. The problem is that if a company wishes to sell something to a US-based firm, that firm will need to comply to US patent law. The company, if based in the EU, has nothing to fear, but its clients have. And these clients may ask for indemnification from the company, which the company is probably unwilling to provide.
So what I expect to happen, is that many European companies will not trade with the US anymore. This is probably a big step in getting the US a saner patent system anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmmm. Good night-time tv...
How about: "As the person responsible for the budget, I put my signature on a request for funding to start developing the internet."
You are obviously no mathematician, if you think a counterexample proves a statement...
But I agree mathematics is at its most beautiful when proofs are elegant. Unfortunately, many of the elegant proofs are already discovered; it is the area of inelegant proofs that is still wide open...
No, but you don't need to implement it for the same OS.
Tell it to Andrew Wiley.
But it can. When the algorithm is published, you can implement it from scratch on a different computer. If humans are peers for humans, doesn't it make sense that computers are peers for computers?
(Frankly, I also think that Java is overburdened with many standard ways that do the same thing, with only slight differences between them. How am I going to choose between those?)
When I am interested in a concept, I look at a concepts book. When I need to solve a problem in a specific language, I want the code for that language. Translating a concept to a language is not trivial, unfortunately.
I knew a kid that was named Gandalf too. The poor child, it couldn't even fall back to its second name, which was Pepin.
Moderate parent +1 Sick.
But it would make a fun sequel to Katamari Damacy (sp?). You start as a tiny beetle, who lays tiny little turds, which you try to dump on ants. And you transfer through different stages -- you become a mouse who dumps on beetles, a bird who soils statues, a rabbit who lets people slip on tiny marbles, etc. -- until you reach the final goal: you become a huge mammoth who completely COVERS people in poo! I would play that!
True, but not knowing how something is done doesn't mean "paranormal" forces are at work. Furthermore, while Randi doesn't always know how "they" do it, very often he can easily replicate the effect in his own way.
Randi set his million dollar prize so that he would be able to investigate claims in controlled circumstances -- which is not normally the case. And in those circumstances, he has never encountered anything out of the ordinary.
And last, even if this is a placebo, the placebo efect in itself is a mystery. Nobody knows how it works and that was the first point of the original article.
Nobody knows how gravity works. But that doesn't make gravity a mystery.
Hogwash. Nowadays games are meant for almost-instant gratification. A gamer must be able to overcome any challenge quickly, or he will be bored with the game and go on to something else.
I was 20 years of age when I got my C64. Before that time, I did math puzzles for entertainment. The most interesting puzzles took days to solve. The biggest challenge I faced I worked on for three full weeks before being able to solve it.
Then, in the early days of home computing, you had text adventures that took weeks, if not months to solve. I solved the Zork trilogy without assistance, but I worked on them for over two years.
Nowadays, a game is called "challenging", if it contains a situation that takes 10 minutes to solve. As soon as it takes 15, it is called "boring" or "impossible". But hey, there's always a walkthrough, isn't there?
This situation is understandable from a game publisher's point of view. A game won't sell if it is a real challenge. And I think there are many games today that are more entertaining than Zork or math puzzles. For my personal entertainment, I seldom go back to games that are over 10 years old.
But don't tell me today's games teach you tenacity. Rather the opposite, I would say.
Book Summary
Well, as soon as you have a shark with a laser printer attached to its head, you have everything you'll ever need, is it not?
Do you mean reading the screen that started with "The party of the first part shall be known in this document as the party of the first part"?
It was a joke...
You are being ridiculous. If you are not qualified for a job as an executive manager, you'll lose the job soon enough. If you ARE qualified for the job, you'll have plenty of chances to get that job later if you really want it (since you're still in diapers).
The question is, do you have enough money now, do you like your work now, and what are your ambitions?
If your main ambition is to make lots of cash, sure, go for the high-paying job.
If your main ambition is to have fun in your life and in your work, think it over really hard.
An interesting story about that in the same book was about one of the rooms in a dungeon. Due to the engine, all creatures in a dungeon were enemies: you couldn't converse with them. Garriot had 256 special rooms, each taking op one screen. While filling these rooms, he was looking for interesting sprites to use. He had already filled two-hundred rooms with demons, zombies, dragons, and other critters, when he noticed a sprite he used in the villages, of a child. So he created a dungeon room consisting of cells, with a child in each cell. The player could simply walk through the room, not being bothered by the cells, but he had the ability to pull a lever and open the cell doors. The thing is, that after the player did that, the children were released and would attack the player -- they were monsters, because the game could only have monsters in dungeons.
When the game was betatested, one beta-tester found this room, and was outraged. He sent angry letters that Garriott's new game required the killing of children. He even approached Garriott's parents, asking them if they could talk to their son, which they did. Garriott argued that the game didn't require killing children at all: you didn't need to go through this room, you didn't need to open the cells, and even if you did, you didn't need to kill the children -- you could put them to sleep, or just ignore them. His parents argued that it was just one room, and it wasn't important, so why wouldn't he take it out. But that only convinced Garriott more that the room should stay in. He knew many players wouldn't care, and would happily kill the children, but a few might be facing a moral dilemma, where they were hindered by the children, but didn't want to kill them. And that was exactly what Garriott wanted to achieve with Ultima IV, that players would THINK about their actions.
All in the 1980s...
Reminds me of my first programming job. For five years I worked for a boss, who only drew screenshots and then said: "Program this".
You should turn your idea around and give a cash reward every month to users who have NOT been infected by adware. There should be a certain amount of money available each month, which is divided among the users that get the reward.
To keep users interested in this program, they should all run a small app that constantly keeps a window open and displays how many PCs on the network are not effected yet, so they can calculate at any time how much money they are going to get (or will fail to get if they get infected).
Implementing this app should be simple: it just runs a systems check every ten minutes, and transmits the gathered information to a central server. The sysadmin then send regular updates.
But such a reward costs money, you will say. No worries! The same app can simply display ads. I hear many companies are interested in displaying ads on users' monitors. It could even result in a positive cash-flow.
I tell you, rewarding users is the way to go.
Furthermore, I think they will have serious problems selling the later games. The interview says they are planning NINE adventures, each based on one of the books. But the books are so closely intertwined, that the public for the games will dwindle away when some people fail to play one game, and thus cannot get into the next games anymore. I expect that by the time book five is reached, the public will be gone, especially since Master of the Eastern Border is a low point in the Bone series (mind you, it is still far better than most of the trash out there, but for Bone this is not a very interesting part of the story).
And then you have the problem that the story is so complex and convoluted, that you easily forget things that happened. Every time a new Bone book was published, I read the books which came before it before tackling the new one. However, I do not intend to replay eight Bone GAMES before tackling the ninth one.
Maybe, if they stick really close to the books, they can deliver each game with the comics that preceded it?
One of the finest moments in my programming career was when my boss asked me to see if I could gain a speed improvement in a program that surveyed a huge datastore and generated volumes of text from it. This program had to run once a month, and deliver its result in the same month. The program that was originally written, unfortunately, took three months to run (it started out OK, but the data store had grown considerably). They had asked one of our "best programmers" to create a faster version of the program. He did that by reprogramming the entire thing in assembly (you may now understand why managers thought he was one of the best programmers). It took him six whole months to finish the new version. The resulting program completed the task in just about one month. However, my boss was afraid that when the datastore would grow a bit more, we would again be in trouble. That's when he asked me to look it over. I started by investigating the problem, which at first glance looked like a network traversing problem. I soon realised it could be solved by a nested matrix multiplication (which is, of course, a standard way to discover paths in a network). It was a matrix with about a million rows and columns, but since it contained only zeroes and ones (with a couple of thousands times more zeroes than ones), the multiplication was easy to implement in a fast way. Within half-a-day, I had built a prototype program in a high-level language which did the whole job in a few hours.
While I am still pleased with this result, I really think it came off so well not because I was so smart, but because the assembly programmer was not really worthy of the name. Still, I often use this as an illustration for students who are writing illegible code and argue that it is so very fast.
True, but if the patent isn't accepted in Belgium as valid, then the patent is worthless in Belgium, even if it is accepted in the US. Only if Belgium accepts the patent, the priority date becomes an issue.
Basically, US patents ARE null and void in the EU. They only hold in the US. The problem is that if a company wishes to sell something to a US-based firm, that firm will need to comply to US patent law. The company, if based in the EU, has nothing to fear, but its clients have. And these clients may ask for indemnification from the company, which the company is probably unwilling to provide.
So what I expect to happen, is that many European companies will not trade with the US anymore. This is probably a big step in getting the US a saner patent system anyway.