I can use doubly linked lists, sort algorithms, mandelbrot, etc., because when I needed them I learned how to use them.
When did you ever "need" to use mandelbrot? What did that job pay? I ask because I'd love to make money doing that sort of thing, but have never found anyone who cares enough to pay for it. I did have a few professors in University who were impressed / intrigued with riffs on mandelbrot, etc., but effectively, I was paying them...
Moreover, people from that environment tend to be (mostly) pretty well adjusted and agreeable, especially since they've had enough experience with other very smart people that they realize they're no longer the only sharp fork in the drawer by any means.
I'll second that "mostly" - but the ones that run around cultivating and defending their image as the brightest bulb on the tree are truly a unique experience to be around, uniquely unpleasant. This also applies to the "blue collar programmers" who know a couple of things that their bosses don't and think that gives them some unique persecuted status - news flash: if you don't know plenty of things your boss doesn't, he's not a very good boss, his job is to take care of things you don't know much about and let you get on with your work. Not that all bosses are magnificent, magnanimous people who work for the benefit of their subordinates, not by a long shot.
In the real world, I've seen no correlation between education and programming ability, or communication skills, or planning skills. Absolutely none whatsoever.
I have seen some strong negative correlations, at the Ph.D level, many Ph.D's have trouble following simple instructions, many of them also have some social deficits which arrested their development at the academic level (i.e. they couldn't cut it in the real world at age 22, and many still can't even with 6 more years of school.)
This is, of course, a generalization, drawn from the Ph.Ds I have encountered in the "will code for money" market, and isn't even true for all of them. Many Ph.Ds are brilliant individuals doing world changing work with brilliant skills across many areas. But, I wouldn't say most.
If the activity is illegal, there's probably at least one programmer within the company who does, or should, know what he's doing and that it is wrong. To design the system so that each compartment is so ignorant of what the whole is doing that they wouldn't have knowledge of illegal actions would be extremely costly and prone to failure.
Matter of taste, but the world restricted to: Brunei, China (People's Republic of China), Indonesia, Jordan, Kuwait, Mali, the Marshall Islands, Mauritania, the Federated States of Micronesia, the Russian Federation, São Tomé & Príncipe, Saudi Arabia, Togo, Vanuatu, Taiwan doesn't look like a bad way to spend the next 50 years and a billion dollars to me.
I doubt Bernie was that generous from the goodness of his heart, but if you were inside that scam and you didn't extort more than 2% of the haul for yourself, you really are dumb enough to deserve what's coming next.
Maybe we can start paying for the shows we like instead of being coerced into $70/month plans to get a channel that carries a decent show once in awhile.
Wanker! I was perfectly happy in my ignorance, but now I not only know what iPlayer is, I also know that Sony doesn't deliver it to the states. Are there stateside work-arounds? I found the old site with a message that it's "in your XMB now" - bah!
I just posted that I gave up cable service a long long time ago, and I guess that's not true, I do get basic (14 channel) cable bundled with my broadband connection, it costs an extra $3/month - we haven't turned it on more than 3 times in the last year... Thinking of it that way, it's not really worth $12 per hour of use to me, maybe I should cancel it after all.
Actually, I've never paid for cable TV (got my own place in 1992 and just installed an antenna), so maybe I'm not their target demographic anyway.
Last night I watched a 35 minute lecture by Robert Sapolsky on YouTube the night before, a random TED talk. The night before that, hulu, and Netflix has been cheaper than premium cable forever. My parents-in-law gave up their TV in about 2001 and we gave them a cheap PC and Netflix subscription instead, they love it.
Yeah, cable service has been as dead to me for a long long time now.
Isn't that the sign of an "advanced" OS? Each new version of Windows has progressively thrashed my hard drive more until I finally got Vista Ultimate and now the hard drive never stops.
I listen to 100s of hours of 160Kbps.mp3 encoded music which I "learned" in direct (uncompressed) CD playback form. Once every 20 hours or so, there's a bit in a song somewhere that "just sounds wrong" due to the compression. For the other 19 hours and 58 seconds, I can't tell the difference - so, is 160Kbps "good enough?"
Racing games need the rubberbanding - if it were like real life, one crash and you're toast- hopelessly unable to catch up with those who haven't crashed, where's the fun?
The fun is driving a race car as fast as you can, not winning. Granted, if you're good enough winning is better than just racing but I usually disable rubberbanding now. If I fall behind I restart or race against the time and enjoy the track and if I do well I enjoy winning with a large margin on the second. I see no problem with that.
Restart and try-again is pretty much where GT5-Prologue lost it (the fun) for me, in the 3rd level single lap challenge on Suzuka. I'd much rather be able to progress to the next level with a smudge on my record (tried 10x, didn't get the trophy, oh well...) than be forever stuck in dork land because I'm playing with a standard controller instead of a "real wheel". I like challenges, but I don't like to be unable to access content that "I paid for" until I conquer something that I obviously have some dis-ability to conquer after 50+ tries.
For what it's worth, I did a hard drive upgrade on the PS3 and restarted GT5P from the start, and somehow I beat that damn track on about the 5th try this time, think I got 2nd place (you only need 3rd to progress...), I think the previous "character" was somehow adjusted into a challenge/skill that I was just not capable of.
Racing games need the rubberbanding - if it were like real life, one crash and you're toast- hopelessly unable to catch up with those who haven't crashed, where's the fun?
Same thing applies across the board in strategy, FPS, etc., though I do like having the option of "turning the realism up" where there's less adaptation to skill, and another "knob" for overall difficulty. Lately, I'd like to have another "knob" for complexity - something that would dial back the number of available options, like playing World of Warcraft (solo) during the tutorials where there aren't as many spells, units, etc. to deal with. High complexity adds depth and replay-ability, but it creates a barrier to engaging with the game on a casual level.
Most modern games have some variation of a tutorial that starts you off on "easy," "simple," and "adaptive," and works up to the "full blown" game. Having direct control over these three variables would allow the player to customize the gameplay to fit their personal preference, and hopefully would broaden the appeal of the game.
Not that the PS3 is a panacea of free-open media access, but it has done more for the easy enjoyment of videos from the home (DLNA) server than any other piece of "mainstream" hardware I have ever encountered.
The rate of genetic "weird cases" is orders of magnitude higher than the rate of people competing at olympic levels - it's no wonder that the two cross occasionally. I imagine most "weird cases" (XYY, XY with female genitalia, etc.) don't end up being physically superior, but if one does, are they any less entitled to competition than the super-swimmer with the freakish body proportions, or any of the other genetic extremes that end up doing impossibly well in the games?
In a way, world class competition is a celebration of freaks - people who are so far outside the norm that they are better at one or two things than billions of other people. People really should be prepared for there to be something other than grit, drive, determination and endless practice behind these people's success.
I have a PS3 from about 6 months after release - it is a jet engine too... I'm hoping the slim has some minor flaws that create a market for the original with the PS2 compatibility chips, I really want to get rid of the fan noise - my PS3 is used 40% to play music, 55% to play videos, 3% to mess around with Linux, and 2% to play games, the fan noise is seriously annoying when you want to turn the volume down to "ordinary" levels.
I don't even understand why there is a question mark in the title. Everyone in Astronomy should know that this is well-acknowlegded theory in the formation of the planetary system. Generally, for habitable systems it is assumed that a body like Jupiter is necessary to keep away incoming objects, asteroids and comets.
Habitable by what becomes a question... the oceans might provide sufficient buffer for advanced life in a heavy bombardment scenario, and if the crust formed with lots of large pockets, that would provide additional protection - just not for air breathing, sun bathing types.
What I find interesting is the percentage of people here who are "stating the obvious" - obvious to them, postulate that Jupiter is too small to have any significant effect, or that its effects are self-cancelling - which is oversimplified and dramatically incorrect.
If your home security system didn't detect the break-in at the corner bank, would you consider it not worth much too?
Objects beyond Jupiter's orbit are much less brightly lit (not to mention, farther away from Earth) than objects passing closeby. It would be nice to catalog every rock bigger than a Volkswagen in the entire solar system, but you've got to start somewhere. We could be wiped out at any moment by a "dark rock" falling from outside the system, but the evidence to-date suggests that we're much more likely to be hit by something that makes hundreds of passes through our orbit first.
Personally, I'd feel much safer if all the red-light cameras in the world were suddenly switched off, rather than the NEO surveillance system.
Is it actually more likely for a body to be directed away from Earth than to Earth by Jupiter? I mean, it seems that a body not destined for Earth could otherwise hit if affected by Jupiter's gravity sufficiently.
The majority of bodies that might hit Earth are traveling in the plane of the solar system - a near pass at Jupiter has a high probability of ejecting the passee out of the plane, which dramatically reduces the body's likelihood of striking Earth in the future...
So, yes, while Jupiter may actually send a few space rocks our way, far more often it will be scattering them away from us.
It's a bit like saying one speck of dust is protecting another speck of dust from other, smaller dust, as they swirl around an eddy of warm air in a coliseum.
The difference is that the bulk of material in the solar system lies in a plane, and while Jupiter may only cover a tiny fraction of that plane _on any given orbit_ it, and its gravity, does cover a larger radial sweep than the Earth does, so when an object makes enough passes to have a significant chance of hitting Earth, the chance of getting ejected or consumed by Jupiter is much greater.
I'd hardly call it a 100% effective shield, but Earth's rate of bombardment may be an order of magnitude or two lower because of Jupiter's presence.
On a funny note, I was just reading the liner notes of this album yesterday, which calls out the very same theory of Jupiter as Earth's protector.
Airplanes go pretty fast on asphalt actually. A typical commerical airliner takes off at about 200 mph and lands at 150-175. The Concorde took off at 250 mph. The shuttle is well over 200 at touchdown.
Yeah, and the Concorde did so well when it's tires blew on takeoff, too....
The days are certainly gone when Wired used to have people like Neal Stephenson write for them.
Wired used to be cool and had decent writers. Wired used to be something to/read/.
Now? We have this. A fluff advertisement column, but not only that, nothing about the tech end at all. Nothing about the engineering or anything really interesting except that it's a fast car and costs a lot of money. It's also written in the style of a high-school newspaper or Slashdot summary. Wired has become Maxim, but without the girls.
--
BMO
It's most certainly not advertisement, it's more of an excuse to practice some "Gonzo journalism" writing. I remember a similar column by P.J. o'Rorque in Rolling Stone a few years back about a mere $220K Lambo....
Slashdot Mirror
I can use doubly linked lists, sort algorithms, mandelbrot, etc., because when I needed them I learned how to use them.
When did you ever "need" to use mandelbrot? What did that job pay? I ask because I'd love to make money doing that sort of thing, but have never found anyone who cares enough to pay for it. I did have a few professors in University who were impressed / intrigued with riffs on mandelbrot, etc., but effectively, I was paying them...
Moreover, people from that environment tend to be (mostly) pretty well adjusted and agreeable, especially since they've had enough experience with other very smart people that they realize they're no longer the only sharp fork in the drawer by any means.
I'll second that "mostly" - but the ones that run around cultivating and defending their image as the brightest bulb on the tree are truly a unique experience to be around, uniquely unpleasant. This also applies to the "blue collar programmers" who know a couple of things that their bosses don't and think that gives them some unique persecuted status - news flash: if you don't know plenty of things your boss doesn't, he's not a very good boss, his job is to take care of things you don't know much about and let you get on with your work. Not that all bosses are magnificent, magnanimous people who work for the benefit of their subordinates, not by a long shot.
In the real world, I've seen no correlation between education and programming ability, or communication skills, or planning skills. Absolutely none whatsoever.
I have seen some strong negative correlations, at the Ph.D level, many Ph.D's have trouble following simple instructions, many of them also have some social deficits which arrested their development at the academic level (i.e. they couldn't cut it in the real world at age 22, and many still can't even with 6 more years of school.)
This is, of course, a generalization, drawn from the Ph.Ds I have encountered in the "will code for money" market, and isn't even true for all of them. Many Ph.Ds are brilliant individuals doing world changing work with brilliant skills across many areas. But, I wouldn't say most.
If the activity is illegal, there's probably at least one programmer within the company who does, or should, know what he's doing and that it is wrong. To design the system so that each compartment is so ignorant of what the whole is doing that they wouldn't have knowledge of illegal actions would be extremely costly and prone to failure.
I own (one share) of Buffet's little stock, I support his efforts to protect and grow my investment.
i.e., the ass cracks of the world...
Matter of taste, but the world restricted to: Brunei, China (People's Republic of China), Indonesia, Jordan, Kuwait, Mali, the Marshall Islands, Mauritania, the Federated States of Micronesia, the Russian Federation, São Tomé & Príncipe, Saudi Arabia, Togo, Vanuatu, Taiwan doesn't look like a bad way to spend the next 50 years and a billion dollars to me.
I doubt Bernie was that generous from the goodness of his heart, but if you were inside that scam and you didn't extort more than 2% of the haul for yourself, you really are dumb enough to deserve what's coming next.
Maybe we can start paying for the shows we like instead of being coerced into $70/month plans to get a channel that carries a decent show once in awhile.
Wanker! I was perfectly happy in my ignorance, but now I not only know what iPlayer is, I also know that Sony doesn't deliver it to the states. Are there stateside work-arounds? I found the old site with a message that it's "in your XMB now" - bah!
I just posted that I gave up cable service a long long time ago, and I guess that's not true, I do get basic (14 channel) cable bundled with my broadband connection, it costs an extra $3/month - we haven't turned it on more than 3 times in the last year... Thinking of it that way, it's not really worth $12 per hour of use to me, maybe I should cancel it after all.
Actually, I've never paid for cable TV (got my own place in 1992 and just installed an antenna), so maybe I'm not their target demographic anyway.
Last night I watched a 35 minute lecture by Robert Sapolsky on YouTube the night before, a random TED talk. The night before that, hulu, and Netflix has been cheaper than premium cable forever. My parents-in-law gave up their TV in about 2001 and we gave them a cheap PC and Netflix subscription instead, they love it.
Yeah, cable service has been as dead to me for a long long time now.
the disk was thrashed like crazy
Isn't that the sign of an "advanced" OS? Each new version of Windows has progressively thrashed my hard drive more until I finally got Vista Ultimate and now the hard drive never stops.
Like a cutting edge CAD packages, games, financial management and office suites?
Like a hex editor, text adventures, a hex editor, cat, and did I forget to mention a hex editor?
KDE for Win absolutely rocks with Oketa, and, ummm... yeah, there's nothing like Oketa in Windows, well, until KDE for Win came around...
I listen to 100s of hours of 160Kbps .mp3 encoded music which I "learned" in direct (uncompressed) CD playback form. Once every 20 hours or so, there's a bit in a song somewhere that "just sounds wrong" due to the compression. For the other 19 hours and 58 seconds, I can't tell the difference - so, is 160Kbps "good enough?"
Racing games need the rubberbanding - if it were like real life, one crash and you're toast- hopelessly unable to catch up with those who haven't crashed, where's the fun?
The fun is driving a race car as fast as you can, not winning. Granted, if you're good enough winning is better than just racing but I usually disable rubberbanding now. If I fall behind I restart or race against the time and enjoy the track and if I do well I enjoy winning with a large margin on the second. I see no problem with that.
Restart and try-again is pretty much where GT5-Prologue lost it (the fun) for me, in the 3rd level single lap challenge on Suzuka. I'd much rather be able to progress to the next level with a smudge on my record (tried 10x, didn't get the trophy, oh well...) than be forever stuck in dork land because I'm playing with a standard controller instead of a "real wheel". I like challenges, but I don't like to be unable to access content that "I paid for" until I conquer something that I obviously have some dis-ability to conquer after 50+ tries.
For what it's worth, I did a hard drive upgrade on the PS3 and restarted GT5P from the start, and somehow I beat that damn track on about the 5th try this time, think I got 2nd place (you only need 3rd to progress...), I think the previous "character" was somehow adjusted into a challenge/skill that I was just not capable of.
Racing games need the rubberbanding - if it were like real life, one crash and you're toast- hopelessly unable to catch up with those who haven't crashed, where's the fun?
Same thing applies across the board in strategy, FPS, etc., though I do like having the option of "turning the realism up" where there's less adaptation to skill, and another "knob" for overall difficulty. Lately, I'd like to have another "knob" for complexity - something that would dial back the number of available options, like playing World of Warcraft (solo) during the tutorials where there aren't as many spells, units, etc. to deal with. High complexity adds depth and replay-ability, but it creates a barrier to engaging with the game on a casual level.
Most modern games have some variation of a tutorial that starts you off on "easy," "simple," and "adaptive," and works up to the "full blown" game. Having direct control over these three variables would allow the player to customize the gameplay to fit their personal preference, and hopefully would broaden the appeal of the game.
Not that the PS3 is a panacea of free-open media access, but it has done more for the easy enjoyment of videos from the home (DLNA) server than any other piece of "mainstream" hardware I have ever encountered.
The rate of genetic "weird cases" is orders of magnitude higher than the rate of people competing at olympic levels - it's no wonder that the two cross occasionally. I imagine most "weird cases" (XYY, XY with female genitalia, etc.) don't end up being physically superior, but if one does, are they any less entitled to competition than the super-swimmer with the freakish body proportions, or any of the other genetic extremes that end up doing impossibly well in the games?
In a way, world class competition is a celebration of freaks - people who are so far outside the norm that they are better at one or two things than billions of other people. People really should be prepared for there to be something other than grit, drive, determination and endless practice behind these people's success.
I'd like a deluxe edition PS3 too - one with 2GB of RAM, and maybe a little clock-speed boost in the cell management unit (that Linux runs on...)
I have a PS3 from about 6 months after release - it is a jet engine too... I'm hoping the slim has some minor flaws that create a market for the original with the PS2 compatibility chips, I really want to get rid of the fan noise - my PS3 is used 40% to play music, 55% to play videos, 3% to mess around with Linux, and 2% to play games, the fan noise is seriously annoying when you want to turn the volume down to "ordinary" levels.
I don't even understand why there is a question mark in the title. Everyone in Astronomy should know that this is well-acknowlegded theory in the formation of the planetary system. Generally, for habitable systems it is assumed that a body like Jupiter is necessary to keep away incoming objects, asteroids and comets.
Habitable by what becomes a question... the oceans might provide sufficient buffer for advanced life in a heavy bombardment scenario, and if the crust formed with lots of large pockets, that would provide additional protection - just not for air breathing, sun bathing types.
What I find interesting is the percentage of people here who are "stating the obvious" - obvious to them, postulate that Jupiter is too small to have any significant effect, or that its effects are self-cancelling - which is oversimplified and dramatically incorrect.
If your home security system didn't detect the break-in at the corner bank, would you consider it not worth much too?
Objects beyond Jupiter's orbit are much less brightly lit (not to mention, farther away from Earth) than objects passing closeby. It would be nice to catalog every rock bigger than a Volkswagen in the entire solar system, but you've got to start somewhere. We could be wiped out at any moment by a "dark rock" falling from outside the system, but the evidence to-date suggests that we're much more likely to be hit by something that makes hundreds of passes through our orbit first.
Personally, I'd feel much safer if all the red-light cameras in the world were suddenly switched off, rather than the NEO surveillance system.
Is it actually more likely for a body to be directed away from Earth than to Earth by Jupiter? I mean, it seems that a body not destined for Earth could otherwise hit if affected by Jupiter's gravity sufficiently.
The majority of bodies that might hit Earth are traveling in the plane of the solar system - a near pass at Jupiter has a high probability of ejecting the passee out of the plane, which dramatically reduces the body's likelihood of striking Earth in the future...
So, yes, while Jupiter may actually send a few space rocks our way, far more often it will be scattering them away from us.
It's a bit like saying one speck of dust is protecting another speck of dust from other, smaller dust, as they swirl around an eddy of warm air in a coliseum.
The difference is that the bulk of material in the solar system lies in a plane, and while Jupiter may only cover a tiny fraction of that plane _on any given orbit_ it, and its gravity, does cover a larger radial sweep than the Earth does, so when an object makes enough passes to have a significant chance of hitting Earth, the chance of getting ejected or consumed by Jupiter is much greater.
I'd hardly call it a 100% effective shield, but Earth's rate of bombardment may be an order of magnitude or two lower because of Jupiter's presence.
On a funny note, I was just reading the liner notes of this album yesterday, which calls out the very same theory of Jupiter as Earth's protector.
Airplanes go pretty fast on asphalt actually. A typical commerical airliner takes off at about 200 mph and lands at 150-175. The Concorde took off at 250 mph. The shuttle is well over 200 at touchdown.
Yeah, and the Concorde did so well when it's tires blew on takeoff, too....
The days are certainly gone when Wired used to have people like Neal Stephenson write for them.
Wired used to be cool and had decent writers. Wired used to be something to /read/.
Now? We have this. A fluff advertisement column, but not only that, nothing about the tech end at all. Nothing about the engineering or anything really interesting except that it's a fast car and costs a lot of money. It's also written in the style of a high-school newspaper or Slashdot summary. Wired has become Maxim, but without the girls.
-- BMO
It's most certainly not advertisement, it's more of an excuse to practice some "Gonzo journalism" writing. I remember a similar column by P.J. o'Rorque in Rolling Stone a few years back about a mere $220K Lambo....