What about characteristics which emerge from the combination of beneficial mutations? They may not serve any specific purpose, but they will still easily become part of the species.
The primality test for these Mersenne primes does not consist of sieving, that would be way too slow given the size of these numbers.
Instead, the Lucas-Lehmer test is used, a very simple iterative process which you can implement in a few lines of code in most programming languages. It's described here:
It's less efficient to do this than using each core for one independent number, so it's only used if quick checking of a number is desired (for example, when double-checking a previously found prime number).
Actually invensense (the company behind the Wii sensors) has stated absolute position and orientation is possible by combining the IR with accelerometers and gyroscopes (i.e. MotionPlus):
"This value proposition was embraced by Nintendo. We don't manufacture the [MotionPlus] accessory--there's been some confusion about that--but we offer a multi-axis MEMS gyroscope to Nintendo that, when combined with the other sensors and the sensor bar, offers a true six-axis motion controller experience."
Six axis meaning six degrees of freedom, i.e. absolute positioning and orientation.
There's a lot of information if you combine these three things together... The gyroscopes give you angles, the IR gives you the distance from the TV and the accelerometers can help to improve the accuracy of the previous measurements.
You could be right, but there's no proof. That was just an early demo, and the fact that they show it that way doesn't mean they couldn't keep tracking its position.
Of course the IR can be used to know the actual position in space (together with the Wii remote sensors and Wii MotionPlus), but that won't work when the remote is not facing the sensor bar. In reality though, it's probably close enough to 1:1 for most games. More importantly, we can already play with it, whereas the competition's motion controls will have an uphill battle for adoption which is not close to starting yet.
So, in my mind, Sony's got the lead on next gen just from that.
In reality Nintendo has already launched Wii MotionPlus, they have completed software ready to launch and 3rd parties have already launched games which use Wii MotionPlus. Now Nintendo can focus on making a control scheme for their next software, and they have tons of experience with motion controls.
However Nintendo should be worried, because of the lack of HD support and their absymal performance in the games area 2008 (which slowly is changing this year).
In other words, they shouldn't be worried. Most people don't understand or care about HD. I'm sure you've seen people buying huge TVs and then connecting them with composite cables to their DVD player. They're happy about it too.
Nintendo is still selling at more than 50% market share (even though total market share is not quite there yet), and they keep breaking PS2's sales records. The Wii is doing fine.
Project Natal is useless and the way everyone's going gaga over it is ridiculous.
100% agreed! It's like everyone turned off their brains and started preaching "Natal is the future of gaming".
People don't realize that what makes the Wii remote work is the combination of motion controls, IR aiming and buttons/analog stick for things that motion doesn't do well. Essentially Natal will turn every game into something similar to the worst Wii software, which doesn't use motion judiciously. Either that or they'll add buttons/triggers/sticks to Natal, which will make it largely useless (the value of tracking your whole body is greatly diminished when your hands are too occupied).
It's hilarious when you realize Nintendo has been taking shit for 3 years due to motion controls. A competitor does the same and suddenly it's the big thing.
- Fans paying higher prices they'd otherwise pay (or not being able to afford seeing the concert). - Tickets potentially going unsold, due to people who can't bother with finding the scalpers. You see, the scalpers are not as easy to find as the ticket booth, and they charge higher prices. Some people might also think the concert is sold out, when in fact there are still plenty of tickets out. This also harms the scalpers if it happens, but they can still make a profit by charging high enough prices on the tickets they do sell. - Due to less tickets getting sold (that could have been sold otherwise), the concert loses some of its awe, the band potentially gains less new fans, less merchandise and in-house food and drinks get sold, hitting the bands as well as the concert organizers in their pockets.
In short, scalpers harm almost everyone related to the concert... The fans, the band and often the organizers.
Squatters, people stealing cars and scalpers benefit some people and harm other people. This post merely made a list of people to whom squatters are beneficial, and discounted all the harmful effects by saying he doesn't understand the hatred for them.
Clearly there are reasons to "hate" squatters and scalpers (who are largely parasites that shuffle domains and tickets around). Whether or not certain people are benefited by scalping and squatting doesn't change that point.
Yeah it's different, but my point was not about legality. My point is that simply because you can find some way in which someone "adds value", that doesn't mean they're a good thing to have.
Now you can continue focusing on the part of the analogy which doesn't matter, or you can actually make an effort to understand what I mean and maybe reply to it. It's your choice.
The point is not that they're stealing. The point is that people stealing cars can also be seen as "adding value" by the same definition that squatters provide value.
Car robbers add value for car owners. If I own a car, don't care about money and decide I don't want it anymore, I can wait for a robber to take the car. Without a car robber, I'd have to sell it myself.
Car robber also add value for car purchasers who want to pay a smaller price. Assume the car shop is selling used cars for $50,000. But people are willing to pay $10,000. Car robbers allocate the cars to those who are willing to pay $2,000 for the car.
I fully support car robbers and do not understand the hatred for them.
Not exactly true, I believe some optimizations are automatically turned off by gcc in debug mode (such as frame pointer omission), and some other ones become undesirable (such as inlined functions, which mess up debugging).
In Visual Studio, I think you can also compile optimized debug files, but you have to set it up yourself rather than use the predefined Debug mode. A few clicks in the "release manager" window probably do the trick.
Some people have done experiments where they copy all the code and 3rd party libraries to the local hard drive, and the compile is much faster. But all that points to the fact that Windows network drivers are bad.
Are you sure about that? Could it not be that Clearcase for windows sucks? You do know there are plenty of Windows networked applications which work just fine...
Missing functionality in the system. Lots of common POSIX features just aren't present on Windows. Things like symlink(2)/readlink(2), fork(2), signals, and even strptime(3) just aren't present. We've mostly worked around these (providing our own implementation, or using other methods), but it's a pain, and some things don't work right.
That's not a problem with Windows per se, you just want it to be more like Unix. A Windows-focused developer would say the same about Unix development.
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What about characteristics which emerge from the combination of beneficial mutations? They may not serve any specific purpose, but they will still easily become part of the species.
The primality test for these Mersenne primes does not consist of sieving, that would be way too slow given the size of these numbers.
Instead, the Lucas-Lehmer test is used, a very simple iterative process which you can implement in a few lines of code in most programming languages. It's described here:
http://primes.utm.edu/mersenne/index.html#test
It probably has a bunch of quick checks that can tell it "definitely not prime", "definitely prime" or just give up if none of the heuristics applies.
One of the checks they could add is the one you mentioned (a list of the known ones).
Here is a result which says true:
http://www29.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=is+3+a+prime+number
I guess it knows (2^n-1) can only be a prime number if n is prime (that's a known theorem).
Actually that's not exactly correct, each iteration is also parallelizable. Most of the work in an iteration is a FFT, which is parallelizable.
http://www.fftw.org/parallel/parallel-fftw.html
It's less efficient to do this than using each core for one independent number, so it's only used if quick checking of a number is desired (for example, when double-checking a previously found prime number).
The code has been tested, as this is not the first prime numbers this project finds (far from it in fact).
Apparently it hasn't been tested enough though ;)
Do you realize that that's less efficient than using those 32 cores to calculate 32 independent numbers?
What if the phone automatically reserves battery for emergency use, and only uses that last part of the battery for emergency calls?
Yeah because everyone knows that computers, phones etc etc. all got electricity to be so expensive, right?
Even if it was expensive, it would still be more ecological and enable the US to be more energy-independent.
Actually invensense (the company behind the Wii sensors) has stated absolute position and orientation is possible by combining the IR with accelerometers and gyroscopes (i.e. MotionPlus):
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2008/08/wii-motion-sensor.ars
Six axis meaning six degrees of freedom, i.e. absolute positioning and orientation.
There's a lot of information if you combine these three things together... The gyroscopes give you angles, the IR gives you the distance from the TV and the accelerometers can help to improve the accuracy of the previous measurements.
You could be right, but there's no proof. That was just an early demo, and the fact that they show it that way doesn't mean they couldn't keep tracking its position.
Of course the IR can be used to know the actual position in space (together with the Wii remote sensors and Wii MotionPlus), but that won't work when the remote is not facing the sensor bar. In reality though, it's probably close enough to 1:1 for most games. More importantly, we can already play with it, whereas the competition's motion controls will have an uphill battle for adoption which is not close to starting yet.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acND4sO3pJs
Looks pretty damn 1:1 to me. Where Sony is now is about where Nintendo's tech demos were 1 year ago.
In reality Nintendo has already launched Wii MotionPlus, they have completed software ready to launch and 3rd parties have already launched games which use Wii MotionPlus. Now Nintendo can focus on making a control scheme for their next software, and they have tons of experience with motion controls.
Sony is just playing catch up for now.
In other words, they shouldn't be worried. Most people don't understand or care about HD. I'm sure you've seen people buying huge TVs and then connecting them with composite cables to their DVD player. They're happy about it too.
Nintendo is still selling at more than 50% market share (even though total market share is not quite there yet), and they keep breaking PS2's sales records. The Wii is doing fine.
And then you can write any crappy book, not worrying about competition. Double bonus! Unless you're trying to learn from the books of course.
100% agreed! It's like everyone turned off their brains and started preaching "Natal is the future of gaming".
People don't realize that what makes the Wii remote work is the combination of motion controls, IR aiming and buttons/analog stick for things that motion doesn't do well. Essentially Natal will turn every game into something similar to the worst Wii software, which doesn't use motion judiciously. Either that or they'll add buttons/triggers/sticks to Natal, which will make it largely useless (the value of tracking your whole body is greatly diminished when your hands are too occupied).
It's hilarious when you realize Nintendo has been taking shit for 3 years due to motion controls. A competitor does the same and suddenly it's the big thing.
Harmful effects include:
- Fans paying higher prices they'd otherwise pay (or not being able to afford seeing the concert).
- Tickets potentially going unsold, due to people who can't bother with finding the scalpers. You see, the scalpers are not as easy to find as the ticket booth, and they charge higher prices. Some people might also think the concert is sold out, when in fact there are still plenty of tickets out. This also harms the scalpers if it happens, but they can still make a profit by charging high enough prices on the tickets they do sell.
- Due to less tickets getting sold (that could have been sold otherwise), the concert loses some of its awe, the band potentially gains less new fans, less merchandise and in-house food and drinks get sold, hitting the bands as well as the concert organizers in their pockets.
In short, scalpers harm almost everyone related to the concert... The fans, the band and often the organizers.
Squatters, people stealing cars and scalpers benefit some people and harm other people. This post merely made a list of people to whom squatters are beneficial, and discounted all the harmful effects by saying he doesn't understand the hatred for them.
Clearly there are reasons to "hate" squatters and scalpers (who are largely parasites that shuffle domains and tickets around). Whether or not certain people are benefited by scalping and squatting doesn't change that point.
Yeah it's different, but my point was not about legality. My point is that simply because you can find some way in which someone "adds value", that doesn't mean they're a good thing to have.
Now you can continue focusing on the part of the analogy which doesn't matter, or you can actually make an effort to understand what I mean and maybe reply to it. It's your choice.
That's not the point of the analogy:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1256203&threshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=28214813#28215469
The point is not that they're stealing. The point is that people stealing cars can also be seen as "adding value" by the same definition that squatters provide value.
Car robbers add value.
Car robbers add value for car owners. If I own a car, don't care about money and decide I don't want it anymore, I can wait for a robber to take the car. Without a car robber, I'd have to sell it myself.
Car robber also add value for car purchasers who want to pay a smaller price. Assume the car shop is selling used cars for $50,000. But people are willing to pay $10,000. Car robbers allocate the cars to those who are willing to pay $2,000 for the car.
I fully support car robbers and do not understand the hatred for them.
Not exactly true, I believe some optimizations are automatically turned off by gcc in debug mode (such as frame pointer omission), and some other ones become undesirable (such as inlined functions, which mess up debugging).
In Visual Studio, I think you can also compile optimized debug files, but you have to set it up yourself rather than use the predefined Debug mode. A few clicks in the "release manager" window probably do the trick.
Are you sure about that? Could it not be that Clearcase for windows sucks? You do know there are plenty of Windows networked applications which work just fine...
That's not a problem with Windows per se, you just want it to be more like Unix. A Windows-focused developer would say the same about Unix development.