<blockparaphrase>Composition was once a sort of trance where slightly insane people wrote music down feverishly. Our way, based on mathematics, is much better. Regular, based on curves and graphs.</blockparaphrase>
The very thing I love about renaissance music is its mathematical elegance. The reasonably simple rules of counterpoint, coupled with the fact that in those days most music was vocal, so there were exact integer pitch relationships between notes (unlike these days when equal temperament has made all intervals into irrational ratios) together guarantee a beautiful sounding piece, much like the hip-hop piece I heard on the site sounded nice enough.
The thing that separates Josquin and Ockegheim (the giants of the period) from the likes of Jacquet of Mantua is the amount of effort they put in to create something special. It was usually well proportioned, in the renaissance way, but had something extra, the difference between a well-produced Shakespeare play and a sitcom episode. I'll still be meeting my musical needs with human compositions for a while.
using namespace std; #include <iostream> #include <vector> #include <stdlib.h>
...etc. only demonstrates a basic knowledge of C, which is not what the competition organisers would be interested in, so I think basic templates should be fine (as any good programmer will use them anyway). In a good competition the problems would be of the kind that could be found in any number of non-standard libraries, so I imagine the best preparation would be a few standard templates and a willingness to be creative.
Accurate time keeping is great in modern society for catching trains and making appointments (though I've had more success catching trains since my housemate set the microwave clock in the kitchen a couple of minutes fast). I suspect that overall we tend to be too uptight about time: for 99.5% of human history we've watched time pass with the sun, moon and seasons. If several Australian aboriginal tribes were having a council, the first to arrive would almost certainly have to wait a few days for the last to arrive, but this didn't bother them as presumably they had enjoyable or productive ways of filling in their time. In our modern society, we're often stuck with a long wait ahead and nothing to do.
The USA/Canada, Britain/Europe and Australia are each about a third of the way round the world from each other, so Slashdot submissions from each country would spike at different times during the day.
And there's plenty interesting stuff going on in Australia, especially if you think Telstra is eeeevil!
Don't mention to this ideological right-wing government that an astute leftie from way back (Kenneth Davidson of The Age) suggested this years ago, of course suggesting that the wholesale arm should remain owned by the government.
Telstra has been abusing its monopoly for years, charging ISPs more for wholesale services than it charges retail. Alas the chance of getting some clear, visionary thought (ie past the next election) from this government is depressingly low.
Sooo, if you run a cafe that, w/o free wifi, already has hordes of loyal impassioned customers and quick turnover, your business already does what a successful cafe should do
Paid wifi: kind of dumb business model. Great if you need it and mainly work at the same place, but #'s of users are usually pretty few. Won't drive revenues for an otherwise flailing cafe.
Yes, a good café will be all about the coffee and atmosphere. To integrate wireless and let people surf or work without spoiling this atmosphere is the big challenge.
Yeah, this idea that people used to show up at the office, get straight to work, and work for 8 hours straight-- it's a myth. That never happens.
On the rare occasions that I have to work a full day with clients looking over my shoulder the whole time, I'm beyond exhausted, and make my way home in a zombatonic state that my girlfriend never fails to notice.
I bought a cheap 2 button mouse to play Warcraft with, but it was crap. I suspect I'd have to pay more than I'm willing to spend to find a multi-button mouse equal to Apple's mouse in smoothness, let alone in elegance
Just curious- what does this let you do on today's internet that I couldn't do on my 1.5Mbps connection? Only a few sites I visit seem to be able to serve at this rate. Does anyone do high quality video, for example, and is the internet infrastructure between their place and your place able to cope with such a high bandwidth?
"The way it is drafted strongly suggests that the reproduction and caching activity done by Google or the Wayback Machine at archive.org and similar essential research tools would be illegal in Canada," he says. "It could be read by a court as a 'deeming' provision, which was hopefully not the intention."
Any judge potentially making this judgement should be made to do without Google for a couple of weeks before adjudicting. And his family.
I think if you look at how modern humans treat each other, which numerous extermination attempts between ethnic groups, I don't think it's too hard to imagine a group of homo sapiens hunting down all Neanderthals, and being relatively successful if they have greater intelligence and/or weaponry.
I suspect that a biblical or modern genocide would require organisation beyond the means of hunter-gatherers who went around in groups of no larger than a few families, however much they disliked the Neanderthals. On the other hand, competing for resources and making Neanderthals' staple foods extinct (even inadvertently) was well within their means.
On the tech aspect, something I didn't know Koster mentions is that 40% of the cpu processing is utilized on pathfinding. Yes, fuckin' pathfinding. A fuckin' decade, and almost half of the potential processing powers developers are allocated is used to fuckin' pathfinding. And you know what? Pathfinding is a joke, it could use a lot of work.
I suspect a lot of work has already been done on pathfinding (the optimum legal way for a monster to get from A to B?). An algorithm that delivered a performance bonus and good pathfinding would be a MMORPG's Holy Grail.
Unless the game makers are happy to get people to buy faster computers for poor pathfinding.
Slashdot Mirror
...someone told Dubya about the big red button?
<blockparaphrase>Composition was once a sort of trance where slightly insane people wrote music down feverishly. Our way, based on mathematics, is much better. Regular, based on curves and graphs.</blockparaphrase>
The very thing I love about renaissance music is its mathematical elegance. The reasonably simple rules of counterpoint, coupled with the fact that in those days most music was vocal, so there were exact integer pitch relationships between notes (unlike these days when equal temperament has made all intervals into irrational ratios) together guarantee a beautiful sounding piece, much like the hip-hop piece I heard on the site sounded nice enough.
The thing that separates Josquin and Ockegheim (the giants of the period) from the likes of Jacquet of Mantua is the amount of effort they put in to create something special. It was usually well proportioned, in the renaissance way, but had something extra, the difference between a well-produced Shakespeare play and a sitcom episode. I'll still be meeting my musical needs with human compositions for a while.
Being able to produce:
...etc. only demonstrates a basic knowledge of C, which is not what the competition organisers would be interested in, so I think basic templates should be fine (as any good programmer will use them anyway). In a good competition the problems would be of the kind that could be found in any number of non-standard libraries, so I imagine the best preparation would be a few standard templates and a willingness to be creative.
I'm excited about how similar it looks to Earth. It looks like central Australia, but is millions of kilometres away.
Cool, so I'd be really good at a life of crime...
Curse my highly developed moral sensibility!
Accurate time keeping is great in modern society for catching trains and making appointments (though I've had more success catching trains since my housemate set the microwave clock in the kitchen a couple of minutes fast). I suspect that overall we tend to be too uptight about time: for 99.5% of human history we've watched time pass with the sun, moon and seasons. If several Australian aboriginal tribes were having a council, the first to arrive would almost certainly have to wait a few days for the last to arrive, but this didn't bother them as presumably they had enjoyable or productive ways of filling in their time. In our modern society, we're often stuck with a long wait ahead and nothing to do.
The USA/Canada, Britain/Europe and Australia are each about a third of the way round the world from each other, so Slashdot submissions from each country would spike at different times during the day.
And there's plenty interesting stuff going on in Australia, especially if you think Telstra is eeeevil!
Interesting... so it looks like any half-hearted split won't work in the long term. My money's on a half-hearted split if there is one.
ISDN was unbelievably overpriced. Get the customer to do their own A/D and D/A conversion, and make them pay a massive premium.
Don't mention to this ideological right-wing government that an astute leftie from way back (Kenneth Davidson of The Age) suggested this years ago, of course suggesting that the wholesale arm should remain owned by the government.
Telstra has been abusing its monopoly for years, charging ISPs more for wholesale services than it charges retail. Alas the chance of getting some clear, visionary thought (ie past the next election) from this government is depressingly low.
That's so cool... there have always been nerds. I can imagine ancient Mesopotanian nerds working out ways to overclock their wheels 5000 years ago...
Yes, a good café will be all about the coffee and atmosphere. To integrate wireless and let people surf or work without spoiling this atmosphere is the big challenge.
I reported a racist in barrens chat too. Maybe that's where they hang out.
But being Australian, I play at the same time as the genuine Chinese players do, and there are plenty of them.
On the rare occasions that I have to work a full day with clients looking over my shoulder the whole time, I'm beyond exhausted, and make my way home in a zombatonic state that my girlfriend never fails to notice.
I bought a cheap 2 button mouse to play Warcraft with, but it was crap. I suspect I'd have to pay more than I'm willing to spend to find a multi-button mouse equal to Apple's mouse in smoothness, let alone in elegance
Just curious- what does this let you do on today's internet that I couldn't do on my 1.5Mbps connection? Only a few sites I visit seem to be able to serve at this rate. Does anyone do high quality video, for example, and is the internet infrastructure between their place and your place able to cope with such a high bandwidth?
Gee, I hope I don't have to meta-moderate this one...
Any judge potentially making this judgement should be made to do without Google for a couple of weeks before adjudicting. And his family.
Back in the day, before Apple so cruelly snitched our floppy drives from us:
We certainly couldn't fit 90 seconds of high quality audio on them!!!
I bring you... the iFloppy.
An area of 40 square miles is a circle of radius 3.6 miles (5.8 km). Is that really more than a digital phone tower can manage, for example?
Why don't you go and destroy all my dearly held nerd-notions, you insensitive clod!
I hope you get your $1000.
Or is there something buried deep within the TOS that you clicked "I agree" to?
That's a low blow. The Neanderthals are extinct and can't even defend themselves from such an affont.
I suspect that a biblical or modern genocide would require organisation beyond the means of hunter-gatherers who went around in groups of no larger than a few families, however much they disliked the Neanderthals. On the other hand, competing for resources and making Neanderthals' staple foods extinct (even inadvertently) was well within their means.
I suspect a lot of work has already been done on pathfinding (the optimum legal way for a monster to get from A to B?). An algorithm that delivered a performance bonus and good pathfinding would be a MMORPG's Holy Grail.
Unless the game makers are happy to get people to buy faster computers for poor pathfinding.