Take any six-digit number that's of the form ABCABC where A,B,C are any integers (yes, they can be the same, yes they can be zero, although that might make it less than six-digits if A, or A and B, are zero), and that number is guaranteed to be divisible by 13.
Don't know about Japan, but Korea's biggest problem is that English education here has exploded to the point that the standards for hiring teachers are frighteningly low. Generally, all they require is that you have any university degree from an English speaking country. A B.Ed or a TESOL certificate will get you higher pay, and a Masters or higher will get you a shot at a university gig, but it's really not hard for someone with a degree in something totally unrelated to teaching and/or English to get a cushy job in a metropolitan-area middle school. Of course, the fact that the english alphabet has some subtleties that the Korean alphabet (for want of a better word) lacks, means that it helps to have someone in the room demonstrating (for instance) how to differentiate between the 'b' and 'v' phonetics. But when you get right down to it you've got a ton of people in the position of authoritative English instructors who, in terms of their qualifications, are getting regarded and paid more than they're worth.
What's happened is that English education has become its own industry with tons of hagwons (private after-school academies) popping up all over, both legal and illegal. They really just need a white guy or girl to help with sales. That they prefer white people is in itself a symptom of the problem -- they bring foreigners over to teach not because they're more qualified (maybe as english speakers, but hardly as teachers) but because they're convinced that a parent is more likely to send their kid to a hagwon if they see whitey interacting directly with the kids. Please note, that's a criticism of the schools, which can often be quite shadey, not the parents, who run the full gamut from loving every foreigner who comes into their country to being somewhat xenophobic.
Not all schools, and not necessarily even hagwons, are all that bad, but treating education as a business has become a problem that's even penetrated the public school system. It might get worse before it gets better, and it's too bad, because I think they're hoping for faster results than are realistic.
Anyhow, I doubt the robot thing will catch on, at least not to the point that I'll be out of a job (I've been here 3 years now and still going), but it is emblematic of a culture that's taking pretty radical approaches to English education. Correcting kids' pronunciation? That's hard to do without a human mouth over-enunciating things, and the brain wiring needed to instantly differentiate between almost-homonyms ('bet' and 'vet', for instance).
What's more, discipline is often an issue when teaching in Korea, which means that they're going to need teachers there ANYWAY. Although, it might be fun watching a robot putting the kids in line.
No violence, swearing: For all Violence, no blood, no swearing: 12 Violence with blood & swearing: 15 Extreme violence with blood & swearing: 18 Boobies: OH MY GOD 25 AT LEAST WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN??????
I want faster load ups. I want a machine that turns on and boots instantaneously. I want games to start running the moment I double-click on them. I want my 2 GHz chip with its generation of software to perform quicker than my 400 MHz chip did with its generation of software.
Ok, I understand we can't all get what we want, so I want to know why what I want isn't happening.
Not really much more to say than that. Sorry you couldn't get it published conventionally. Writing's hard, though, so it's really dead cool of you to give it away.
It's worth noting that Michael Moore did make a serious attempt to figure out the context of Columbine, and he took a lot of flack for it from the right wing. Ironic, since he had some criticism of Clinton in that movie. I guess the neo-cons will never be happy until Moore does a feature-length film of his lips attached to Tom Delay's ass.
And it was a really good movie. Yeah, he did a bit of gotcha-journalism by ambushing Charlton Heston and Dick Clark, but other than Katz, he was probably the only guy to make a serious attempt to figure out what the heck is going on with gun culture in the U.S. as it related to Columbine.
And no offence to Katz, but neither he nor Moore are big shots in today's media environment. It's one of the reasons I laugh whenever the phrase "liberal media" is used.
Intel produces chips that are inferior to and more expensive than their AMD counterparts, and yet they still have a stranglehold on many major PC and laptop vendors.
Apart from really, really shitty customer service on AMD's part, what other explanation could there be?
Actually, as an aside, I wanted to buy an AMD processor over here in Korea, and the guy said that AMD had lousy customer service. Has anybody found this to be the case? If not, it would make Intel's prominence in the chip field even more ludicrous...
Microsoft and Linux and MacOSX might actually be on the way out, or at least on the way to obscurity. All of these offer interfaces to the computer, and that's useful in its own way, but I think one thing that Google has figured out is that mastery of the computer is a means to an end, not an end unto itself. It's throwing an abstracted layer over the top of it all and owning that layer, and making it useful enough that people eventually aren't going to care what OS they're running, so long as it'll give us what google has to offer.
Google maps. Translation services. Multimedia access. Shopping/Pricing comparison. News. Wikipedia (well, not exclusively, but you get my point). Limitless-space email. They're coming closer to giving us what we expect computers to give their users in Sci-Fi movies.
Google's on the verge of becoming THE content broker. What's odd is that from this point of view, Yahoo is more of a player than Microsoft at this point. But they've got to be worrying. Most of what google's done has been collecting and mining, but with Google maps developing the way it is, it's obvious that they're doing more than just throwing a bunch of computer clusters at a problem.
Anyways, if this is what they're about, the consistency behind all their new forays, then maybe Microsoft's already lost the battle to Google, but they're stuck on what no longer matters as much, which is people's relationship to the computer. Google, by focusing on people's relationship to the content, is miles ahead now.
Yeah, yeah, -1 full of shit or totally obvious, but I really think this is the way it's going.
I don't suppose John Carmack is reading but...
on
GeForce 7800 GTX Review
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
When all those articles were coming out about Doom 3 being such a sophisticated engine that current hardware couldn't take full advantage of it, I couldn't help but wonder, how do you know that? How do you test a claim regarding performance on non-existent hardware? So, that got me wondering, was Doom 3 tested on nvidia 7800 prototypes, or maybe 8800 (pretending it exists)? Further to the point, if Id has access to this avant garde stuff, what can we expect?
I'm not writing this as a skeptic. I'm honestly just curious.
...if somewhere in Japan or Korea or China they've got tributes to poor translations from English into their languages.
Lord knows there's lots of potential. "Don't see" or "Don't sleep" in Korean comes close to "vagina" and "penis", and Microsoft's first effort to build a brand in Asia (not quite sure where) ended up with something that came out as "small and soft".
Not much more to say than just subject header. If our culture dictates that the only reason to go to university is to get a job, it's only going to devalue education as a whole, and in a few years it'll be some other useless metric used to determine who gets a job.
Of course the issue is grayer than that, but there's nothing philosophically wrong with Steve's point. And, last I checked, Steve Jobs didn't have to go to Monter.com et al to make his eventual fortune.
Universities are filled with people who are there just because someone felt they had to go to university. If a speech like this makes them question what it is that's really important about a university education, then that's probably more thought-provoking than half the shit they actually DID have to study at university.
Granted, it'd be better as an address to freshmen than the graduating class, but there's still nothing wrong with it.
To anybody who thinks it's stupid for Jobs to play down the importance of a university education, I ask this: what is being done to demonstrate the importance of a university education? Other than talking about the importance of a piece of paper, that is.
I wonder if this will encourage programmers to actually intentionally obfuscate their code.
Case in point, one thing that some people think is worth doing in the first few rounds of poker is to intentionally lose or call as many hands as you can, just to determine your opponents' betting methods and/or tells. Could something similar be done with programs? For instance, measuring the number of clock ticks that an opponent takes to analyze a given hand. If identical flops show up in subsequent rounds, and identical intervals lead to identical bets, is it possible that you've figured out how your opponent likes to bet? Furthermore, would it be worthwhile to throw in an empty do() while loop of random length in order to throw off such attempts? But how about betting patterns themselves?
This is one thing I've always thought was missing in creating AI. It's not so much about coming up with "perfect" AI because so long as it follows a set pattern, it'll never be perfect. If it's consistent, either you'll figure out how to beat it, or you'll give up in frustration because you know you can never beat it. But create multiple different AIs that follow basic tactics, and then mix them up, there's the challenge.
Slashdot Mirror
Not really hard to prove, but it's cute.
Take any six-digit number that's of the form ABCABC where A,B,C are any integers (yes, they can be the same, yes they can be zero, although that might make it less than six-digits if A, or A and B, are zero), and that number is guaranteed to be divisible by 13.
If you're guessing my name, yeah. Korean doesn't have the "dr" consonant pair so you've got to separate it into two separate syllables.
Dave's ESL Cafe
Don't know about Japan, but Korea's biggest problem is that English education here has exploded to the point that the standards for hiring teachers are frighteningly low. Generally, all they require is that you have any university degree from an English speaking country. A B.Ed or a TESOL certificate will get you higher pay, and a Masters or higher will get you a shot at a university gig, but it's really not hard for someone with a degree in something totally unrelated to teaching and/or English to get a cushy job in a metropolitan-area middle school. Of course, the fact that the english alphabet has some subtleties that the Korean alphabet (for want of a better word) lacks, means that it helps to have someone in the room demonstrating (for instance) how to differentiate between the 'b' and 'v' phonetics. But when you get right down to it you've got a ton of people in the position of authoritative English instructors who, in terms of their qualifications, are getting regarded and paid more than they're worth.
What's happened is that English education has become its own industry with tons of hagwons (private after-school academies) popping up all over, both legal and illegal. They really just need a white guy or girl to help with sales. That they prefer white people is in itself a symptom of the problem -- they bring foreigners over to teach not because they're more qualified (maybe as english speakers, but hardly as teachers) but because they're convinced that a parent is more likely to send their kid to a hagwon if they see whitey interacting directly with the kids. Please note, that's a criticism of the schools, which can often be quite shadey, not the parents, who run the full gamut from loving every foreigner who comes into their country to being somewhat xenophobic.
Not all schools, and not necessarily even hagwons, are all that bad, but treating education as a business has become a problem that's even penetrated the public school system. It might get worse before it gets better, and it's too bad, because I think they're hoping for faster results than are realistic.
Anyhow, I doubt the robot thing will catch on, at least not to the point that I'll be out of a job (I've been here 3 years now and still going), but it is emblematic of a culture that's taking pretty radical approaches to English education. Correcting kids' pronunciation? That's hard to do without a human mouth over-enunciating things, and the brain wiring needed to instantly differentiate between almost-homonyms ('bet' and 'vet', for instance).
What's more, discipline is often an issue when teaching in Korea, which means that they're going to need teachers there ANYWAY. Although, it might be fun watching a robot putting the kids in line.
It's a four word job description. "Shut the heck up."
'I would have expected to see something like this suggested by one of our more immature community members as a joke on Slashdot,'
I don't know. These days it seems like the editors don't comment as much as they used to...
[rimshot]
The short answer is "yes".
Now, ask that question again, this time including the word "well".
No violence, swearing: For all
Violence, no blood, no swearing: 12
Violence with blood & swearing: 15
Extreme violence with blood & swearing: 18
Boobies: OH MY GOD 25 AT LEAST WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN??????
I want faster load ups. I want a machine that turns on and boots instantaneously. I want games to start running the moment I double-click on them. I want my 2 GHz chip with its generation of software to perform quicker than my 400 MHz chip did with its generation of software.
Ok, I understand we can't all get what we want, so I want to know why what I want isn't happening.
Is the server performance a Longhorn preview as well?
Not really much more to say than that. Sorry you couldn't get it published conventionally. Writing's hard, though, so it's really dead cool of you to give it away.
It's worth noting that Michael Moore did make a serious attempt to figure out the context of Columbine, and he took a lot of flack for it from the right wing. Ironic, since he had some criticism of Clinton in that movie. I guess the neo-cons will never be happy until Moore does a feature-length film of his lips attached to Tom Delay's ass.
And it was a really good movie. Yeah, he did a bit of gotcha-journalism by ambushing Charlton Heston and Dick Clark, but other than Katz, he was probably the only guy to make a serious attempt to figure out what the heck is going on with gun culture in the U.S. as it related to Columbine.
And no offence to Katz, but neither he nor Moore are big shots in today's media environment. It's one of the reasons I laugh whenever the phrase "liberal media" is used.
"He's on fire!"
You don't know joy until you're playing as Dikembe Mutumbo and raining 3's on the opponent.
Intel produces chips that are inferior to and more expensive than their AMD counterparts, and yet they still have a stranglehold on many major PC and laptop vendors.
Apart from really, really shitty customer service on AMD's part, what other explanation could there be?
Actually, as an aside, I wanted to buy an AMD processor over here in Korea, and the guy said that AMD had lousy customer service. Has anybody found this to be the case? If not, it would make Intel's prominence in the chip field even more ludicrous...
Since the beginning of time man has yearned to destroy the sun...
Nah. Was the post that gay?
Sorry. I'm working on a few beers right now. The revelation seemed mind-blowing at the time.
I think I've started figuring google out.
Microsoft and Linux and MacOSX might actually be on the way out, or at least on the way to obscurity. All of these offer interfaces to the computer, and that's useful in its own way, but I think one thing that Google has figured out is that mastery of the computer is a means to an end, not an end unto itself. It's throwing an abstracted layer over the top of it all and owning that layer, and making it useful enough that people eventually aren't going to care what OS they're running, so long as it'll give us what google has to offer.
Google maps. Translation services. Multimedia access. Shopping/Pricing comparison. News. Wikipedia (well, not exclusively, but you get my point). Limitless-space email. They're coming closer to giving us what we expect computers to give their users in Sci-Fi movies.
Google's on the verge of becoming THE content broker. What's odd is that from this point of view, Yahoo is more of a player than Microsoft at this point. But they've got to be worrying. Most of what google's done has been collecting and mining, but with Google maps developing the way it is, it's obvious that they're doing more than just throwing a bunch of computer clusters at a problem.
Anyways, if this is what they're about, the consistency behind all their new forays, then maybe Microsoft's already lost the battle to Google, but they're stuck on what no longer matters as much, which is people's relationship to the computer. Google, by focusing on people's relationship to the content, is miles ahead now.
Yeah, yeah, -1 full of shit or totally obvious, but I really think this is the way it's going.
When all those articles were coming out about Doom 3 being such a sophisticated engine that current hardware couldn't take full advantage of it, I couldn't help but wonder, how do you know that? How do you test a claim regarding performance on non-existent hardware? So, that got me wondering, was Doom 3 tested on nvidia 7800 prototypes, or maybe 8800 (pretending it exists)? Further to the point, if Id has access to this avant garde stuff, what can we expect?
I'm not writing this as a skeptic. I'm honestly just curious.
Vi still better than emacs.
Rome builds shitty wall, Emperor blames failure on existence of barbarian hordes.
It'd sound fucking ludicrous to read that in a history book, it's no less ludicrous to read that in a modern context.
Dude, grow a pair.
...if somewhere in Japan or Korea or China they've got tributes to poor translations from English into their languages.
Lord knows there's lots of potential. "Don't see" or "Don't sleep" in Korean comes close to "vagina" and "penis", and Microsoft's first effort to build a brand in Asia (not quite sure where) ended up with something that came out as "small and soft".
Not much more to say than just subject header. If our culture dictates that the only reason to go to university is to get a job, it's only going to devalue education as a whole, and in a few years it'll be some other useless metric used to determine who gets a job.
Of course the issue is grayer than that, but there's nothing philosophically wrong with Steve's point. And, last I checked, Steve Jobs didn't have to go to Monter.com et al to make his eventual fortune.
Universities are filled with people who are there just because someone felt they had to go to university. If a speech like this makes them question what it is that's really important about a university education, then that's probably more thought-provoking than half the shit they actually DID have to study at university.
Granted, it'd be better as an address to freshmen than the graduating class, but there's still nothing wrong with it.
To anybody who thinks it's stupid for Jobs to play down the importance of a university education, I ask this: what is being done to demonstrate the importance of a university education? Other than talking about the importance of a piece of paper, that is.
I'm holding out for x86-yaddayadda compatibility. You early adopters can go nuts.
I wonder if this will encourage programmers to actually intentionally obfuscate their code.
Case in point, one thing that some people think is worth doing in the first few rounds of poker is to intentionally lose or call as many hands as you can, just to determine your opponents' betting methods and/or tells. Could something similar be done with programs? For instance, measuring the number of clock ticks that an opponent takes to analyze a given hand. If identical flops show up in subsequent rounds, and identical intervals lead to identical bets, is it possible that you've figured out how your opponent likes to bet? Furthermore, would it be worthwhile to throw in an empty do() while loop of random length in order to throw off such attempts? But how about betting patterns themselves?
This is one thing I've always thought was missing in creating AI. It's not so much about coming up with "perfect" AI because so long as it follows a set pattern, it'll never be perfect. If it's consistent, either you'll figure out how to beat it, or you'll give up in frustration because you know you can never beat it. But create multiple different AIs that follow basic tactics, and then mix them up, there's the challenge.