That's not the traveling salesman problem at all, it's just shortest path and is not intractable like the TSP. The Dijkstra Algorithm will give you the perfect solution and as far as I know is the fastest as well. That is actually what google does every time you ask for driving directions - it treats intersections as graph nodes and streets as graph edges, weighs edges based on length and average speed limit, and solves for the shortest weighted path.
Traveling salesman seems like a trivial modification of this problem, but it doesn't have any "tricks" to it like the Dijkstra algorithm. You have to generate all possible routes (brute force) and sort them, which eventually turns into a LOT of work, kind of like guessing a secure password.
Radio frequencies are a limited resource and not just something anybody can use at will. We the people own the frequencies the cell companies use to make money. We made a deal with the cell companies. They get exclusive access to the applicable frequencies in return for providing a service we want. Cell phone availability on those frequencies during a disaster is a public good that we demand. If cell companies can't provide service the way we want it, we can cancel the deal and find someone else who can. Therefore the FCC (our representatives) can shut you down (cancel the deal) unless you follow its (our) rules.
It's pure capitalism, you just forgot one of the parties in the arrangement.
I have a 1.8GHz Athlon64 as well, and get great performance under Windows. I've played on my sister's 2.53GHz Celeron and it performs horribly no matter how low I set the video settings (and her gfx card really is not a total piece of junk, it's an ATI 9600XT). I've noticed a LOT of hard disk activity during the slowdowns on her system, and indeed she only has 512MB of RAM, while my machine has 1G. So if your windows box is under 1G of RAM, that could be the source of your trouble. I am going to upgrade her RAM soon and find out once and for all.
You probably need to slightly throttle your own upload speed within bitcomet. Your ISP implements a throttle to enforce your rated upload speed. If you are uploading at full speed, the ISP will start dropping packets and your download slows dramatically with all the errors. Bitcomet should have a setting that makes this more intelligent - it won't send out more packets than you are rated for, so there won't be any packet loss.
Yeah, just get Shell to fund all the environmental scientists! Great idea.
Somebody has to do this stuff, and it's not desirable for them to be for-profit. If they're non-profit, then they are essentially a mini-government; they need funding (without the ability to tax), and some form of oversight. Now extend it out to all the other things that need doing, and we end up with thousands of non-profit organizations that we have to pay dues to and keep from accepting bribes. Most people can't even keep their eye on one president to keep him honest.
"...tip off that liquid explosives would have been involved... Makes you wonder where they'll be trying to hide explosives next. Full body cavity search for all passengers?"
And I thought I had a bad case of explosive diarrhea.
My copy of WoW came with a free 10-day invite-a-friend coupon. They play for 10 days for free then at the end they have to buy the full copy and start a subscription. I agree though that the upfront fee is a little too much considering how much money you're going to sink into it in the coming months.
Beyond Good and Evil was a great example of a game where the story made it good. The gameplay was utterly basic but because the world was so vibrant and the story so good, I kept playing to the end and I remember it as one of the more enjoyable games I've played.
For all your anti-script kiddie needs! Just don't EVER type the words "insert" and "select" in your forum post. Or "insert" and "into". Or "update" and "set".
True story. Took me hours to figure out why people were complaining about missing posts.
Wow I hope this gets through/.'s mod_security rules.:P
PHP's mysqli extension supports paramaterized SQL, but it is still not in wide use. The majority of web servers still don't even have mysqli installed, and most programmers stick with the old extension out of habit anyway. Not to mention the huge base of code already written that's being exploited every day.
Even in mysqli, the process is not very elegant. I work in PHP but the first thing I ever did in the language was write a database framework that works similarly to DBI (as implemented in Perl), I would totally hate PHP if I didn't have it.
The PHP devs also decided to create the craptacular "magic quotes" feature, which I'm sure seemed to be a good idea at the time, but in retrospect stalled real web security awareness for years. So yeah, PHP is a big culprit here.
There is a new gen of systems coming this fall, it's not surprising at all that console sales are down. TFA says PC sales are up, so I don't see anything unusual. Console sales will pick back up when (flamebait) the Wii comes out.
For DRM to fail in the entertainment industry, all that needs to happen is for customers to choose not to buy it, which in turn should convince artists not to use it.
For tainted meat to fail in the beef industry, all that needs to happen is for customers to choose not to buy it, which in turn should convince meat-packers not to use it.
For snake oil to fail in the pharmaceutical industry, all that needs to happen is for customers to choose not to buy it, which in turn should convince traveling salesman not to hawk it.
Consumers won't find out until later that they've made a mistake. Regulating that kind of schlock is what the government is for.
Sorry but outsourcing does mean lower quality service, for no other reason than the language barrier. Obviously people in these outsourced countries are just as smart as the average westerner. However, the average westerner could not provide support for India either!
It's hard enough for tech support to understand their customers when they speak the same native language. When you add a language barrier in there, it's just bad service, plain and simple.
You're right though in that the real problem, is our pervasive culture of cheap. There was a time when you called a company's support line to try to figure out a problem, but that's just not possible anymore. There's no money dedicated to it.
Even if you get a native English speaker, he's paid just over minimum wage and reads from a script. If he had the know-how to help you, he'd have a better job. Now all the support line is good for is getting a tech to sign off on a warranty repair/return - after you spend 5 hours convincing them the product is broken.
"You see, if we don't protect a player's name from being stolen and used in some video game, mothers will stop naming their babies, people with names won't be allowed to play football, mass pandemonium! Hell, the NFL itself might collapse for lack of capitalizing on a fictional piece of property!"
So basically, EA pays a bunch of money for exclusive use of NFL property, and we get to pay more to justify the investment, all for the privilege of being served by a monopoly provider. Awesome. It's a good thing the bastards didn't patent football. I'm sure they would if they could get away with it.
With patents, company C will withhold drug D from millions of poor cancer patients, even though it costs very little to run more pills for them.
Just something to consider.
P.S. Government-funded research is pretty wide-spread, efficient, and most importantly, results enter the public domain. Drug companies are best at developing "consumer" drugs like Viagra for sex drive, Prozac for mood swings, Vicoden (sp?) for strong pain relief, etc.
I wondered about that too. I came up with three likely reasons.
1) People share more than a couple files at a time with eMule. With bittorrent I never share more than 4 torrents at once, but with eMule there can be quite a few available. This doesn't slow the network down as a whole, but probably allows traffic to concentrate more strongly on the popular files.
2) Tit-for-tat. Bittorrent is more aggressive in enforcing upload/download ratio, so the pure leechers have a somewhat harder time. It also encourages people to open the appropriate ports on their router/firewall, which can improve overall network efficiency.
3) Many people don't realize that if you have an upload cap imposed by your ISP (DSL modem or one of many cable providers), bittorrent will clog it easily and downloads will slow to almost nothing. You'd think people would figure it out, but many don't, especially those using the traditional client on windows (you have to use a command line argument to choke upload speed). Those users who don't figure it out give the rest of us a boost.
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That's not the traveling salesman problem at all, it's just shortest path and is not intractable like the TSP. The Dijkstra Algorithm will give you the perfect solution and as far as I know is the fastest as well. That is actually what google does every time you ask for driving directions - it treats intersections as graph nodes and streets as graph edges, weighs edges based on length and average speed limit, and solves for the shortest weighted path.
Traveling salesman seems like a trivial modification of this problem, but it doesn't have any "tricks" to it like the Dijkstra algorithm. You have to generate all possible routes (brute force) and sort them, which eventually turns into a LOT of work, kind of like guessing a secure password.
"Capitalization and punctuation as important to my built in English parser as spelling and grammar."
I don't think your English parser is built in. You just don't remember installing it.
Radio frequencies are a limited resource and not just something anybody can use at will. We the people own the frequencies the cell companies use to make money. We made a deal with the cell companies. They get exclusive access to the applicable frequencies in return for providing a service we want. Cell phone availability on those frequencies during a disaster is a public good that we demand. If cell companies can't provide service the way we want it, we can cancel the deal and find someone else who can. Therefore the FCC (our representatives) can shut you down (cancel the deal) unless you follow its (our) rules.
It's pure capitalism, you just forgot one of the parties in the arrangement.
I have a 1.8GHz Athlon64 as well, and get great performance under Windows. I've played on my sister's 2.53GHz Celeron and it performs horribly no matter how low I set the video settings (and her gfx card really is not a total piece of junk, it's an ATI 9600XT). I've noticed a LOT of hard disk activity during the slowdowns on her system, and indeed she only has 512MB of RAM, while my machine has 1G. So if your windows box is under 1G of RAM, that could be the source of your trouble. I am going to upgrade her RAM soon and find out once and for all.
You probably need to slightly throttle your own upload speed within bitcomet. Your ISP implements a throttle to enforce your rated upload speed. If you are uploading at full speed, the ISP will start dropping packets and your download slows dramatically with all the errors. Bitcomet should have a setting that makes this more intelligent - it won't send out more packets than you are rated for, so there won't be any packet loss.
Yeah, just get Shell to fund all the environmental scientists! Great idea.
Somebody has to do this stuff, and it's not desirable for them to be for-profit. If they're non-profit, then they are essentially a mini-government; they need funding (without the ability to tax), and some form of oversight. Now extend it out to all the other things that need doing, and we end up with thousands of non-profit organizations that we have to pay dues to and keep from accepting bribes. Most people can't even keep their eye on one president to keep him honest.
"...tip off that liquid explosives would have been involved... Makes you wonder where they'll be trying to hide explosives next. Full body cavity search for all passengers?"
And I thought I had a bad case of explosive diarrhea.
My copy of WoW came with a free 10-day invite-a-friend coupon. They play for 10 days for free then at the end they have to buy the full copy and start a subscription. I agree though that the upfront fee is a little too much considering how much money you're going to sink into it in the coming months.
Beyond Good and Evil was a great example of a game where the story made it good. The gameplay was utterly basic but because the world was so vibrant and the story so good, I kept playing to the end and I remember it as one of the more enjoyable games I've played.
For all your anti-script kiddie needs! Just don't EVER type the words "insert" and "select" in your forum post. Or "insert" and "into". Or "update" and "set".
/.'s mod_security rules. :P
True story. Took me hours to figure out why people were complaining about missing posts.
Wow I hope this gets through
PHP's mysqli extension supports paramaterized SQL, but it is still not in wide use. The majority of web servers still don't even have mysqli installed, and most programmers stick with the old extension out of habit anyway. Not to mention the huge base of code already written that's being exploited every day.
Even in mysqli, the process is not very elegant. I work in PHP but the first thing I ever did in the language was write a database framework that works similarly to DBI (as implemented in Perl), I would totally hate PHP if I didn't have it.
The PHP devs also decided to create the craptacular "magic quotes" feature, which I'm sure seemed to be a good idea at the time, but in retrospect stalled real web security awareness for years. So yeah, PHP is a big culprit here.
There is a new gen of systems coming this fall, it's not surprising at all that console sales are down. TFA says PC sales are up, so I don't see anything unusual. Console sales will pick back up when (flamebait) the Wii comes out.
I think it's called use it or lose it.
Hell, I know a lot of gamers in the States that worship Korean gamers as gods. :P
For DRM to fail in the entertainment industry, all that needs to happen is for customers to choose not to buy it, which in turn should convince artists not to use it.
For tainted meat to fail in the beef industry, all that needs to happen is for customers to choose not to buy it, which in turn should convince meat-packers not to use it.
For snake oil to fail in the pharmaceutical industry, all that needs to happen is for customers to choose not to buy it, which in turn should convince traveling salesman not to hawk it.
Consumers won't find out until later that they've made a mistake. Regulating that kind of schlock is what the government is for.
Sorry but outsourcing does mean lower quality service, for no other reason than the language barrier. Obviously people in these outsourced countries are just as smart as the average westerner. However, the average westerner could not provide support for India either!
It's hard enough for tech support to understand their customers when they speak the same native language. When you add a language barrier in there, it's just bad service, plain and simple.
You're right though in that the real problem, is our pervasive culture of cheap. There was a time when you called a company's support line to try to figure out a problem, but that's just not possible anymore. There's no money dedicated to it.
Even if you get a native English speaker, he's paid just over minimum wage and reads from a script. If he had the know-how to help you, he'd have a better job. Now all the support line is good for is getting a tech to sign off on a warranty repair/return - after you spend 5 hours convincing them the product is broken.
Is there a pirated video of this available anywhere?
Can I watch it twice?
I can't imagine how this argument goes..
"You see, if we don't protect a player's name from being stolen and used in some video game, mothers will stop naming their babies, people with names won't be allowed to play football, mass pandemonium! Hell, the NFL itself might collapse for lack of capitalizing on a fictional piece of property!"
So basically, EA pays a bunch of money for exclusive use of NFL property, and we get to pay more to justify the investment, all for the privilege of being served by a monopoly provider. Awesome. It's a good thing the bastards didn't patent football. I'm sure they would if they could get away with it.
With patents, company C will withhold drug D from millions of poor cancer patients, even though it costs very little to run more pills for them. Just something to consider. P.S. Government-funded research is pretty wide-spread, efficient, and most importantly, results enter the public domain. Drug companies are best at developing "consumer" drugs like Viagra for sex drive, Prozac for mood swings, Vicoden (sp?) for strong pain relief, etc.
I wondered about that too. I came up with three likely reasons.
1) People share more than a couple files at a time with eMule. With bittorrent I never share more than 4 torrents at once, but with eMule there can be quite a few available. This doesn't slow the network down as a whole, but probably allows traffic to concentrate more strongly on the popular files.
2) Tit-for-tat. Bittorrent is more aggressive in enforcing upload/download ratio, so the pure leechers have a somewhat harder time. It also encourages people to open the appropriate ports on their router/firewall, which can improve overall network efficiency.
3) Many people don't realize that if you have an upload cap imposed by your ISP (DSL modem or one of many cable providers), bittorrent will clog it easily and downloads will slow to almost nothing. You'd think people would figure it out, but many don't, especially those using the traditional client on windows (you have to use a command line argument to choke upload speed). Those users who don't figure it out give the rest of us a boost.