The Antarctic Peninsula stretches northward from the rest of the continent. "Southern Antarctic Peninsula" refers to the region of the peninsula closer to the South Pole.
The post states that early deployment caused the in-flight break-up. The article clearly states that they don't know yet.
“I’m not stating that this is the cause of the mishap,” he added. “We have months and months of investigation to determine what the cause was.”
In addition to the possibility of pilot error, Hart said the NTSB is looking a variety of other issues that may have caused or contributed to the accident, including training, spacecraft design and the safety culture at Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites, which designed and manufactured the spaceship.
“There is much more that we don’t know and our investigation is far from over,” Hart said.
This seems as good a time as any to dust off Betteridge's law of headlines: "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
I mean, come on people. The British government runs the BBC, and stands to make trillions of dollars from people believing the Earth is round. It's so obvious that this article was a plant.
Why on earth do we still have a screen that says "Press start"?!?!? If you ask yourself, why don't any games say "press start 6 times to begin", the answer is obvious. But why do I even have to press it once?
Because the console companies make us put it in.:)
...or it's like a smail mail connection where you can't send messages as letters from the Post Office!
Just because it has limitations relative to another method doesn't mean it's pointless -- it just has different uses. And as was pointed out in a recent Scientific American article here, line-of-sight is probably ok in office settings as long as your signals can bounce around the room.
I think that a lot of the issue here is a personal stake in whether games are art or not. I can understand the desire to have one's passions be regarded as an art, especially as a game developer myself. But to use a mundane example, even my printer has artistic qualities to it. There probably was an artist involved at some stage to make it aesthetically pleasing. And while he and maybe some of his peers may be "moved" by the artistic nuances of my paper tray, I doubt that we'll see it on a museum shelf for at least a few years.
I can totally understand and agree with Kojima's position. It doesn't negate my work to bring engaging art into games, and it doesn't mean that someone can't choose to make a game that is truly a piece of art.
I think to be art, a message is required of the artist, a message that is the true intent. The intent may be to illuminate, to evoke an emotion, to startle, or even to repulse. While counterexamples do exist, the true intent of most games is to entertain for the duration of game play. So unless we're prepared to call my karaoke rendition of "Video Killed the Radio Star" art, we maybe shouldn't be so offended.
The combustion of liquid H2 does not produce greenhouse gases, unlike oils. The holy grail here is not energy density, but trying to restore the natural carbon cycle and curb catastrophic global warming.
This is some pretty sick stuff. Some of the choice pieces of absurdity for those of you who don't want to provide ad revenue by RTFA:
One blog, Groklaw, exists primarily to bash software maker SCOGroup in its Linux patent lawsuit against IBM, producing laughably biased, pro-IBM coverage; its origins are a mystery....
Its origins are a mystery?
Last year bloggers posted videos showing how to break open a Kryptonite lock using a ballpoint pen. That much was true. But they also spread bogus information--that all Kryptonite models could be cracked with a pen; that it is the only brand with this vulnerability; and that Kryptonite knew about the problem and covered it up. None of these claims is true, but a year later Kryptonite still struggles to set the record straight, while spending millions to replace locks.
This is truly sad. Some crackpots cooked up some conspiracy theory and Kryptonite has to replace their admittedly useless locks. But let's not overlook my personal favorite:
Google and other carriers shut down purveyors of child porn, spam and viruses, and they help police track down offenders. So why don't they delete material that defames individuals? Why don't they help victims identify their attackers? Because they are protected by the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which frees a neutral carrier of Internet content from any liability for anything said online.
"Blogging is still in its infancy. Imposing regulations would create a chilling effect," says Annalee Newitz, until recently a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that defends anonymous attackers.
Wow, who knew that the EFF had such nefarious goals? Here I was thinking it had something to do with free speech and fair use....
Don't forget integrated, smart debugging. That's one of the most important and underappreciated elements of a good IDE.
I don't think the author is that much against Visual Studio. He was more just pointing out the pitfalls of having an IDE do some of the work for you, tinged with some "simpler days" nostalgia. That said, we cannot go back to the good old days C-style GUI development except for the most basic of applications. We are consuming ever more vast amounts of information every day on our PCs (and game consoles, and even handheld music players for that matter), and such vast amounts of information have to be wrangled.
Properly decoupling components and systems (as the author advocates) trades code complexity for system complexity. And frankly, I'd rather have 30 reusable classes with well-thought interfaces than 5 tightly-coupled functions that can only ever do what they were originally intended for. C++ was designed that way -- to allow properly structured code to facilitate fast, reusable components. C# is a natural result of many years of C++ maturation, just as C++ evolved from C.
With all these components, though, comes the need to be able to quickly access and manipulate them in your code. Visual Studio (which, don't get me wrong, certainly has its faults) makes great strides in making larger tasks tractable.
I think spell-checkers may make some people lazier, but that doesn't stop me from caring how I type. It just means that I don't have to dig out a dictionary when I think I might have spelled something wrong. In the same way, Intellisense doesn't make me lazy -- it just allows me to spend my time focusing on the parts of devlopment that really matter.
Not to mention, according to anyotherarticle that you check out there, you'll see that the gas giant (which of course, could not sustain life on its nonexistent surface), is far outside of the habitable region of the star. It orbits at a distance of only 4 million miles.
That means that a year on that planet lasts less than 4 of our days, and the surface of any rocky moon of that gas giant would be hotter than even Venus or Mercury -- a toasty 1,300 degrees F.
Not all bad programming is lazy. Sometimes there is just not enough funding to hire quality professional programming staff, or to afford expensive servers that can handle a heavy server-side load. I've worked in such environments before -- when you're strapped for cash, you take the staff and hardware you can get.
I've also written fully standards-compliant web apps that didn't work on some random configuration because the browsers were not standards-compliant. In such cases, you either rewrite the offending code for each browser, or, if you're running out of time and money, pick a configuration to support and run with it. Which, of course, brings me back to my earlier point.
All OS decisions have a cost. Deciding not to use a Windows PC has the cost of having to use something like Virtual PC to do those things that are Windows-only.
This is a misdirected protest. If we require every electronic service to support multiple operating systems, we raise the cost of developing and maintaining such services. It is more than likely that in such cases, the cost would be prohibitive and no service would be offered at all.
There is no conspiracy here, and there is no ill will. If the e-tax makers thought about it at all, they probably chose Windows out of a desire to support as many people as possible. It is not their job to tackle the "digusting bias" of our industry.
It doesn't matter whether or not the consoles or their games support keyboards, mice, and the like. What matters to the game developers is the lowest common denominator of user input.
As long as you can't guarantee that every user has a mouse, then you can't use mouse-style input to control your interface. That shoots down traditional RTS interaction, for example. So if an RTS gets released for console, it will be "crippled" in functionality because the design will be focused around the segment of the market that doesn't have mice or keyboards plugged in to their consoles. Developers won't force the hardware to be used because that limits sales.
The PC game industry will always stay around, because it supports a much more customized experience. The basic argument of TFA has been made time and time again, every time a new console is announced or comes out. But while the PC market has shrank, it certainly hasn't gone away. And it won't.
Just because it's "proprietary" doesn't mean they're trying to make it unbreakable. Usually proprietary formats are the result of a company figuring out the simplest and cheapest combination of hardware and software they can make.
As to why they don't make it open source, they really have no reason to. Why should they care if people can't make ISO copies without having to reverse engineer the hardware?
According to his logic, there should be no amusement parks left, because they're all pretty much the same as they have been for decades. This is silly.
People play games for the engagement and the escape from normal life. It doesn't have to be a revolutionary new type of game every time, it just has to keep someone interested. It's not some race to photorealism, it's about being able to give the content that will give the players what they want.
When consoles reach photorealism, that's when the games will start to get really good, because designers will no longer be fettered by silly hardware limitations.
There is an grain of value in what he says though -- companies that don't put emphasis on good design in the coming "photorealistic era" will die. But mostly all the article really says is that John Dvorak is not a gamer.
As someone else has already mentioned, he was explaining abstract data types in Java-ish code, not OOP.
OOP is a much heavier topic and does require a deeper understanding of the material to explain. One does not introduce OOP to someone by giving them code that merely explains the syntax which OOP is implemented upon. So yes, his "target audience" would have trouble, but why was he trying to teach this material to "those who have trouble wrapping the head around OOP concepts" anyway? That's like someone mentioning "nuclear physics" in a post and me replying with some explanation of what the periodic table is as "nuclear physics basics".
For clarification, I did not insult the poster and I was not trolling, I merely stated a simple opinion that this tutorial is the wrong way to go about teaching OOP. This opinion was stated with the only authority that I have -- as a professor who teaches an OOP class.
I hope that no one tries to learn OOP from this. Not only is it a poor explanation and example of what OOP is, but the code wouldn't even compile if you were to try.
If you want to learn OOP with Java somewhere, try this introduction.
No, it didn't. In fact, this is the most important problem in CS. The theory is that there are certainly problems where checking a solution is easy (2 and 3 are unique factors of 6 because it's easy to see that 2*3 == 6) but where the only possible way to find the solution given the answer is to compute the solution for every possible answer.
It's not been proven whether hashing is this type of problem (whether it's NP-complete). Moreover, it's never been proven that there isn't a solution for problems we think are NP.
What's more, it *has* been proven that once we find a solution to an NP-complete problem we'll instantly have solutions for *every* NP-complete problem.
Your example doesn't really make too much sense, and your definition of NP-complete is purely wrong. There are easily demonstrable problems that are not NP-complete where you have to compute the solution for every possible answer, because they are not even in NP to begin with. Example: "If I removed a city from a set of cities in the traveling salesman problem, which city removal would cause the largest reduction in the shortest path length?" In this problem, each possible "answer" (to use your terminology) is NP-complete, thus yielding a non-NP and therefore non-NP-complete solution (unless P==NP).
Furthermore, an NP-complete problem is not unsolvable as you state -- in fact, to be labeled as NP-complete, a solution has to be known. The solution must be formed in terms of a polynomial-time "reduction" from another NP-complete problem. To be NP-complete means merely that the only known solutions would require a non-deterministic "computer" to solve them in polynomial time. As we don't exactly have such machines sitting around, we have to rely on non-polynomial solutions.
Now if we can figure out a way to compute an NP-complete problem in deterministic polynomial time, then all NP-complete problems will be able to be solved in deterministic polynomial time (since all NP-complete problems are declared NP-complete by relating them to each other). But there was always a known solution.
Slashdot Mirror
The Antarctic Peninsula stretches northward from the rest of the continent. "Southern Antarctic Peninsula" refers to the region of the peninsula closer to the South Pole.
Just sayin'.
This seems as good a time as any to dust off Betteridge's law of headlines: "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
I can't believe so many ./ers fell for this.
I mean, come on people. The British government runs the BBC, and stands to make trillions of dollars from people believing the Earth is round. It's so obvious that this article was a plant.
Or "analogous" to the Storm worm, probably what he meant to say...
Because the console companies make us put it in. :)
...or it's like a smail mail connection where you can't send messages as letters from the Post Office!
Just because it has limitations relative to another method doesn't mean it's pointless -- it just has different uses. And as was pointed out in a recent Scientific American article here, line-of-sight is probably ok in office settings as long as your signals can bounce around the room.
Passive magnetic = magnets, with like poles repelling each other
Friction braking = hand brakes
They are keeping it simple, stupid.
Heh, I prefer to patronize my local used CD store clerks.... :)
Or better yet, now you can hear the ridiculous flame wars and "First post!" lameness! I can't wait!
I think that a lot of the issue here is a personal stake in whether games are art or not. I can understand the desire to have one's passions be regarded as an art, especially as a game developer myself. But to use a mundane example, even my printer has artistic qualities to it. There probably was an artist involved at some stage to make it aesthetically pleasing. And while he and maybe some of his peers may be "moved" by the artistic nuances of my paper tray, I doubt that we'll see it on a museum shelf for at least a few years.
I can totally understand and agree with Kojima's position. It doesn't negate my work to bring engaging art into games, and it doesn't mean that someone can't choose to make a game that is truly a piece of art.
I think to be art, a message is required of the artist, a message that is the true intent. The intent may be to illuminate, to evoke an emotion, to startle, or even to repulse. While counterexamples do exist, the true intent of most games is to entertain for the duration of game play. So unless we're prepared to call my karaoke rendition of "Video Killed the Radio Star" art, we maybe shouldn't be so offended.
The combustion of liquid H2 does not produce greenhouse gases, unlike oils. The holy grail here is not energy density, but trying to restore the natural carbon cycle and curb catastrophic global warming.
This is some pretty sick stuff. Some of the choice pieces of absurdity for those of you who don't want to provide ad revenue by RTFA:
Its origins are a mystery?
This is truly sad. Some crackpots cooked up some conspiracy theory and Kryptonite has to replace their admittedly useless locks. But let's not overlook my personal favorite:
Wow, who knew that the EFF had such nefarious goals? Here I was thinking it had something to do with free speech and fair use....
Don't forget integrated, smart debugging. That's one of the most important and underappreciated elements of a good IDE.
I don't think the author is that much against Visual Studio. He was more just pointing out the pitfalls of having an IDE do some of the work for you, tinged with some "simpler days" nostalgia. That said, we cannot go back to the good old days C-style GUI development except for the most basic of applications. We are consuming ever more vast amounts of information every day on our PCs (and game consoles, and even handheld music players for that matter), and such vast amounts of information have to be wrangled.
Properly decoupling components and systems (as the author advocates) trades code complexity for system complexity. And frankly, I'd rather have 30 reusable classes with well-thought interfaces than 5 tightly-coupled functions that can only ever do what they were originally intended for. C++ was designed that way -- to allow properly structured code to facilitate fast, reusable components. C# is a natural result of many years of C++ maturation, just as C++ evolved from C.
With all these components, though, comes the need to be able to quickly access and manipulate them in your code. Visual Studio (which, don't get me wrong, certainly has its faults) makes great strides in making larger tasks tractable.
I think spell-checkers may make some people lazier, but that doesn't stop me from caring how I type. It just means that I don't have to dig out a dictionary when I think I might have spelled something wrong. In the same way, Intellisense doesn't make me lazy -- it just allows me to spend my time focusing on the parts of devlopment that really matter.
Not to mention, according to any other article that you check out there, you'll see that the gas giant (which of course, could not sustain life on its nonexistent surface), is far outside of the habitable region of the star. It orbits at a distance of only 4 million miles.
That means that a year on that planet lasts less than 4 of our days, and the surface of any rocky moon of that gas giant would be hotter than even Venus or Mercury -- a toasty 1,300 degrees F.
Not all bad programming is lazy. Sometimes there is just not enough funding to hire quality professional programming staff, or to afford expensive servers that can handle a heavy server-side load. I've worked in such environments before -- when you're strapped for cash, you take the staff and hardware you can get.
I've also written fully standards-compliant web apps that didn't work on some random configuration because the browsers were not standards-compliant. In such cases, you either rewrite the offending code for each browser, or, if you're running out of time and money, pick a configuration to support and run with it. Which, of course, brings me back to my earlier point.
All OS decisions have a cost. Deciding not to use a Windows PC has the cost of having to use something like Virtual PC to do those things that are Windows-only.
This is a misdirected protest. If we require every electronic service to support multiple operating systems, we raise the cost of developing and maintaining such services. It is more than likely that in such cases, the cost would be prohibitive and no service would be offered at all.
There is no conspiracy here, and there is no ill will. If the e-tax makers thought about it at all, they probably chose Windows out of a desire to support as many people as possible. It is not their job to tackle the "digusting bias" of our industry.
It doesn't matter whether or not the consoles or their games support keyboards, mice, and the like. What matters to the game developers is the lowest common denominator of user input.
As long as you can't guarantee that every user has a mouse, then you can't use mouse-style input to control your interface. That shoots down traditional RTS interaction, for example. So if an RTS gets released for console, it will be "crippled" in functionality because the design will be focused around the segment of the market that doesn't have mice or keyboards plugged in to their consoles. Developers won't force the hardware to be used because that limits sales.
The PC game industry will always stay around, because it supports a much more customized experience. The basic argument of TFA has been made time and time again, every time a new console is announced or comes out. But while the PC market has shrank, it certainly hasn't gone away. And it won't.
As to why they don't make it open source, they really have no reason to. Why should they care if people can't make ISO copies without having to reverse engineer the hardware?
People play games for the engagement and the escape from normal life. It doesn't have to be a revolutionary new type of game every time, it just has to keep someone interested. It's not some race to photorealism, it's about being able to give the content that will give the players what they want.
When consoles reach photorealism, that's when the games will start to get really good, because designers will no longer be fettered by silly hardware limitations.
There is an grain of value in what he says though -- companies that don't put emphasis on good design in the coming "photorealistic era" will die. But mostly all the article really says is that John Dvorak is not a gamer.
As someone else has already mentioned, he was explaining abstract data types in Java-ish code, not OOP.
OOP is a much heavier topic and does require a deeper understanding of the material to explain. One does not introduce OOP to someone by giving them code that merely explains the syntax which OOP is implemented upon. So yes, his "target audience" would have trouble, but why was he trying to teach this material to "those who have trouble wrapping the head around OOP concepts" anyway? That's like someone mentioning "nuclear physics" in a post and me replying with some explanation of what the periodic table is as "nuclear physics basics".
For clarification, I did not insult the poster and I was not trolling, I merely stated a simple opinion that this tutorial is the wrong way to go about teaching OOP. This opinion was stated with the only authority that I have -- as a professor who teaches an OOP class.
I hope that no one tries to learn OOP from this. Not only is it a poor explanation and example of what OOP is, but the code wouldn't even compile if you were to try.
If you want to learn OOP with Java somewhere, try this introduction.
</offtopic>It's not been proven whether hashing is this type of problem (whether it's NP-complete). Moreover, it's never been proven that there isn't a solution for problems we think are NP.
What's more, it *has* been proven that once we find a solution to an NP-complete problem we'll instantly have solutions for *every* NP-complete problem.
Your example doesn't really make too much sense, and your definition of NP-complete is purely wrong. There are easily demonstrable problems that are not NP-complete where you have to compute the solution for every possible answer, because they are not even in NP to begin with. Example: "If I removed a city from a set of cities in the traveling salesman problem, which city removal would cause the largest reduction in the shortest path length?" In this problem, each possible "answer" (to use your terminology) is NP-complete, thus yielding a non-NP and therefore non-NP-complete solution (unless P==NP).
Furthermore, an NP-complete problem is not unsolvable as you state -- in fact, to be labeled as NP-complete, a solution has to be known. The solution must be formed in terms of a polynomial-time "reduction" from another NP-complete problem. To be NP-complete means merely that the only known solutions would require a non-deterministic "computer" to solve them in polynomial time. As we don't exactly have such machines sitting around, we have to rely on non-polynomial solutions.
Now if we can figure out a way to compute an NP-complete problem in deterministic polynomial time, then all NP-complete problems will be able to be solved in deterministic polynomial time (since all NP-complete problems are declared NP-complete by relating them to each other). But there was always a known solution.