I'd argue that becoming an expert TopCoder programmer is no less useless than becoming an expert cup stacker, or an expert Everquest player. Thousands, millions, who knows how many man-hours are devoted to those hobbies... with little real-world application.
At least an expert topcoder user can write you a string parser that works the first time. I'm currently working with a programmer for whom that'd be a massive improvement.
In fact, even more, major companies (Google, for one!) are actually using TopCoder competitions as a recruiting tool -- when I qualified in the 2004 Google Code Jam, I got a "visit our recruiting site" letter along with my shirt.
So clearly at least the guys at google think TopCoder users might actually be hirable programmers.
I would love to see the developers of PHP take a similar route. Their product has often looked very bad as of late, mainly due to security flaws in third-party software written in PHP. While the developers themselves are not to blame, they could still work towards limiting the damage caused by poorly written scripts.
By that reasoning, the developers of C and C++ should be held accountable for the flaws in Windows!
If the guys who write the C compiler aren't responsible for Microsoft's mistakes, why are the developers of PHP responsible for all the shitty code in PHPBB?
I participated in a handful of events at topcoder.com, including last year's Google Code Jam, for which I got this nifty shirt I'm wearing right now.
The problems I encountered there (which I solved in java) were far more difficult than the stuff I do at work (as a PHP/Javascript/MySQL lead web dev). One of the Google Code Jam problems was a real brain twister:
Two rocks are dropped in a pond, and create square ripples. For example, a rock of weight 8 is dropped at a point -- at time zero, it creates a ripple of height 8 at the point it was dropped. at time zero, it creates a 3x3 square ripple of height 7, like so:
777 7 7 777
The problem: given these rules, find the highest ripple height given the locations, drop times and weights of two stones. (If two ripples overlap, the height is equal to the sum of their heights - i.e. if a height 3 and height 4 ripple both occupy the same point, the height at that point is then 7)
The solution 90% of us tried was to simply brute force the problem, creating an array, and updating the array over and over again, comparing the ripple heights to the previous max. The maximum area we were supposed to check was 2000 x 2000 -- so the brute force method timed out (there's a pretty short execution time limit).
The correct solution was to consider time as a third dimension; each rock creates a 4 sided pyramid. Then you only need to check 3 points, which can be done with simple equations: the 'peak' of each pyramid (the height of which happens to be the weight of the corresponding rock) and the intersection of the two pyramids.
Did I mention that there were 4 problems, of which this was the second, all of which had to be solved in a grand total of 90 minutes? And that your score decreases every minute you spend on a problem?
Yeah... TopCoder's rough. And no, custom pre-written libraries won't win this for you -- but they will save you a little time.
Diablo is a direct rip-off of Rogue and its many clones including NetHack. All Diablo brought to the table was evolutionary graphics.
And clicking! Can't forget the clicking!
OH! A pallette shifted *BLUE* skeleton! That's new; I've only killed the Red, Yellow, and Brown skeletons up till now!
CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK. Take that Blue skeleton!
In all seriousness, I find diablo's interface a little easier to use than NetHack's. Did Rogue/Nethack even have plot much less quests and NPCs with speech?
I didn't like DS1's multiplayer at all. I loved DS1 because you could control a party; but in multiplayer you only control a single character!
And when it came to playing a single character, DS1 felt like a crappy, feature limited version of Diablo. I don't remember exactly what it was that made it feel like that, but I remember feeling like there was very little to do in combat compared to D2.
I hope they've done something interesting with DS2's multiplayer.
I was going to ask a similar question -- I went looking for SFU on various p2p networks, hoping it would be an easier alternative to samba, but I couldn't find a single copy.
If no one's pirating a Microsoft product, you'd think next to no one actually uses it.
about 1 in 3 or more games (warcraft III) tend to have at least one player time out because of bnet lag or server issues
I remember lots of players timing out in WC3, but I don't recall any indication that it was bnet's fault, and not the fault of the players' own weak internet connections.
Library: Hey Tom Clancy, can we put your latest book up on our website in MP3? Tom Clancy: FUCK NO! Library: What if we make it expire after 3 weeks, just like if they checked the audio book out on CD from the Library? Tom Clancy: Uh, okay.
The library gets to distribute knowledge widely, so they're happy, and you only get to keep the content for a little while, not unlike normal library lending, so authors and publishers are happy. Everybody wins... Except people who aren't using microsoft OSes:(
And yes, you can abuse DRM'd audio and copy it, but last I heard CD and Audio cassette copy protection has been lagging for a couple decades too.
I've never considered it a problem to use unsupported software. A lot of people still use 98SE... Windows 2000 is mature and stable software, IMO.
True -- if a box has a fixed purpose, win2k will keep working for it, even 20 years from now. On the other hand, if you want to use new hardware and software 5 years from now, win2k isn't going to cut it.
98SE cannot handle LBA drives larger than 137 gig (if it can even handle that), more than a single proc, or more than 2(?) gig of ram. Similarly, there's likely a massive ammount of new software it just won't run (although I don't have any examples off-hand). True, there is always open source, but I don't see the open source movement porting too much to Windows 3.11... Every windows OS suffers the same fate, eventually -- when usership drops, hardware and software support dies with it.
But you're absolutely right. There are still pleantly of shops out there running windows 3.11, because it runs the handful of applications they need for their business, on the same hardware they've had for over a decade. And win2k will still be able to do the same things 20 years from now that it can today, on today's hardware. But you'll probably never get Quake 12 running under it, if only 'cause win2k can't address the required 42 gig of ram and 420 TB harddrive.
There's one good reason to switch to vista:
Microsoft ends support of their OSes after 5 years. Windows 2k, as much as I love it, isn't going to be much fun after a few years without a single patch. XP will go the same way before long.
I have no idea how an access point would be able to monitor how long it took for its packets to make it to the clients...
It probably measures the time between transmission, and the reciept of an ACK(nowledgement). Of course, you'd think a really bogged down machine with a USB Wifi adapter could concievably return ACKs a little slow, and get dropped.
All in all, it seems like a pretty goofy idea: "Secure your WAP: artificially limit it's already meager range!"
the PMP300 I purchased featured a battery compartment that could only use Duracell batteries
Yeah, the battery compartment issue was what eventually trashed my PMP300SE as well -- it was built for a slightly longer AA battery (appearantly duracell's 'premium' electronics batteries were the only ones long enough).
Of course I didn't RTFM, so I kept wondering why my Rio shut off every time I gave it a good shake. I realized it was due to the fact that the generic rechargable AA I was using was a little loose in the compartment, so I started sticking small pieces of conductive crap in there, like aluminum foil. Long story short, after a couple years of heavy use like that, the battery compartment died on me and the damn thing's been sitting in a drawer for the last 5 years.
Depends which model you're talking about.
All of the original Rio PMP300-based models took smartmedia cards. I personally spent a good $300 on a 64MB PMP300SE with an additional 32MB smart media card.
God, flash was expensive in '98:(
At any rate, I can't speak to the model you were looking at, but Rio did make expandable players.
Generally speaking, I'd agree with you. I'd never walked out of a theater in my life until this year.
I went to see "The Grudge" (what can I say, I really liked Ju-On) on a Friday at about 8 PM, about 40 miles south of San Francisco.
For the entire first 30 minutes of the film, the theater sounded like an elementary school playground. Between constant screaming (in the middle of calm scenes, for no reason other than to make noise) and constant talking, I *could not hear dialogue*. Somehow, I'd managed to find the showing all the Junior High kids were attending.
After that first half hour, I gave up and left. The manager gave me a pass, and I came back to see the same movie several days later. No problem whatsoever.
Outside of that, I encounter kids screaming, laser pointers, people shouting, and cellphones ringing maybe 10% of the time, but I generally just ignore it.
I can only assume you're fortunate enough to live somewhere where people are more courteous.
Re:I don't get it? ; onboard ; memory ; solid stat
on
Intel and Laptop RAID?
·
· Score: 1
The good news is the cost of fabbing 1GB of ram keeps going down! Where ram once cost $50/meg ($50,000/gig) it now runs as low as $50/gig -- one thousandth the price of a decade or two ago. Of course, unless something changes, by the time you can pick up ram for $1/gig, we'll have 200 TB harddrives for $200.... But hey, maybe Moore's law will fail for harddrives long before it fails for ram.
There is no such thing as a "one way mirror".http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror#One-way_mirror
Wikipedia has a definition, therefore it must exist!...In all seriousness, the article seems to indicate partially reflective mirrors would reflect some of a laser, and let the rest pass through. "One way mirror" is indeed a misnomer.
Once you stray into obscure topics, the net sometimes fails miserably.
For example, there's next to nothing on Zoroastrianism. The Community College's library had hundreds of times more on the subject than the net.
Sure, there are all the C, C++, Java, PHP, Ruby, MySQL, C#, VB, 8086 machine code, FORTRAN and Comadore 64 assembly resources you could ever want -- but that's because people who care about those things are on the net. There's not a large Zoroastrian community, however.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd argue that becoming an expert TopCoder programmer is no less useless than becoming an expert cup stacker, or an expert Everquest player. Thousands, millions, who knows how many man-hours are devoted to those hobbies... with little real-world application.
At least an expert topcoder user can write you a string parser that works the first time. I'm currently working with a programmer for whom that'd be a massive improvement.
In fact, even more, major companies (Google, for one!) are actually using TopCoder competitions as a recruiting tool -- when I qualified in the 2004 Google Code Jam, I got a "visit our recruiting site" letter along with my shirt.
So clearly at least the guys at google think TopCoder users might actually be hirable programmers.
I would love to see the developers of PHP take a similar route. Their product has often looked very bad as of late, mainly due to security flaws in third-party software written in PHP. While the developers themselves are not to blame, they could still work towards limiting the damage caused by poorly written scripts.
By that reasoning, the developers of C and C++ should be held accountable for the flaws in Windows! If the guys who write the C compiler aren't responsible for Microsoft's mistakes, why are the developers of PHP responsible for all the shitty code in PHPBB?
The problems I encountered there (which I solved in java) were far more difficult than the stuff I do at work (as a PHP/Javascript/MySQL lead web dev). One of the Google Code Jam problems was a real brain twister:
Two rocks are dropped in a pond, and create square ripples. For example, a rock of weight 8 is dropped at a point -- at time zero, it creates a ripple of height 8 at the point it was dropped. at time zero, it creates a 3x3 square ripple of height 7, like so:
The problem: given these rules, find the highest ripple height given the locations, drop times and weights of two stones. (If two ripples overlap, the height is equal to the sum of their heights - i.e. if a height 3 and height 4 ripple both occupy the same point, the height at that point is then 7)
The solution 90% of us tried was to simply brute force the problem, creating an array, and updating the array over and over again, comparing the ripple heights to the previous max. The maximum area we were supposed to check was 2000 x 2000 -- so the brute force method timed out (there's a pretty short execution time limit).
The correct solution was to consider time as a third dimension; each rock creates a 4 sided pyramid. Then you only need to check 3 points, which can be done with simple equations: the 'peak' of each pyramid (the height of which happens to be the weight of the corresponding rock) and the intersection of the two pyramids.
Did I mention that there were 4 problems, of which this was the second, all of which had to be solved in a grand total of 90 minutes? And that your score decreases every minute you spend on a problem?
Yeah... TopCoder's rough. And no, custom pre-written libraries won't win this for you -- but they will save you a little time.
At the bottom of the page there's a button for "Microsoft Alerts"
Do I really need to say it?
Um... Yes.
You could just post as an Anonymous Coward.
Having spent a year in retail, a few things in your story throw up 'professional scammer' alerts in my mind.
I've seen "Hackers"! They use the Red Book to hack the Gibson.
Also, hacking looks a lot like a bad screensaver. There's never any text editing or commandlines involved.
Diablo is a direct rip-off of Rogue and its many clones including NetHack. All Diablo brought to the table was evolutionary graphics.
And clicking! Can't forget the clicking!
OH! A pallette shifted *BLUE* skeleton! That's new; I've only killed the Red, Yellow, and Brown skeletons up till now!
CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK.
Take that Blue skeleton!
In all seriousness, I find diablo's interface a little easier to use than NetHack's. Did Rogue/Nethack even have plot much less quests and NPCs with speech?
I didn't like DS1's multiplayer at all. I loved DS1 because you could control a party; but in multiplayer you only control a single character!
And when it came to playing a single character, DS1 felt like a crappy, feature limited version of Diablo. I don't remember exactly what it was that made it feel like that, but I remember feeling like there was very little to do in combat compared to D2.
I hope they've done something interesting with DS2's multiplayer.
Well, mod me (-1, Retarded)!
It wasn't always free, was it?
I've never met anybody that actually used this
I was going to ask a similar question -- I went looking for SFU on various p2p networks, hoping it would be an easier alternative to samba, but I couldn't find a single copy.
If no one's pirating a Microsoft product, you'd think next to no one actually uses it.
about 1 in 3 or more games (warcraft III) tend to have at least one player time out because of bnet lag or server issues
I remember lots of players timing out in WC3, but I don't recall any indication that it was bnet's fault, and not the fault of the players' own weak internet connections.
do all my surfing using telnet! bash$ telnet slashdot.org 80 GET / HTTP 1.0
...the Plain Old Telephone System frequently fails in disasters as well!
I missed the part where he rejected all scientific research.
All I caught was a rejection of macroevolution.
But strawmen are so much easier to troll, aren't they?
This seems very simple to me:
:(
Library: Hey Tom Clancy, can we put your latest book up on our website in MP3?
Tom Clancy: FUCK NO!
Library: What if we make it expire after 3 weeks, just like if they checked the audio book out on CD from the Library?
Tom Clancy: Uh, okay.
The library gets to distribute knowledge widely, so they're happy, and you only get to keep the content for a little while, not unlike normal library lending, so authors and publishers are happy. Everybody wins... Except people who aren't using microsoft OSes
And yes, you can abuse DRM'd audio and copy it, but last I heard CD and Audio cassette copy protection has been lagging for a couple decades too.
I've never considered it a problem to use unsupported software. A lot of people still use 98SE... Windows 2000 is mature and stable software, IMO.
True -- if a box has a fixed purpose, win2k will keep working for it, even 20 years from now. On the other hand, if you want to use new hardware and software 5 years from now, win2k isn't going to cut it.
98SE cannot handle LBA drives larger than 137 gig (if it can even handle that), more than a single proc, or more than 2(?) gig of ram. Similarly, there's likely a massive ammount of new software it just won't run (although I don't have any examples off-hand). True, there is always open source, but I don't see the open source movement porting too much to Windows 3.11... Every windows OS suffers the same fate, eventually -- when usership drops, hardware and software support dies with it.
But you're absolutely right. There are still pleantly of shops out there running windows 3.11, because it runs the handful of applications they need for their business, on the same hardware they've had for over a decade. And win2k will still be able to do the same things 20 years from now that it can today, on today's hardware. But you'll probably never get Quake 12 running under it, if only 'cause win2k can't address the required 42 gig of ram and 420 TB harddrive.
There's one good reason to switch to vista: Microsoft ends support of their OSes after 5 years. Windows 2k, as much as I love it, isn't going to be much fun after a few years without a single patch. XP will go the same way before long.
I have no idea how an access point would be able to monitor how long it took for its packets to make it to the clients...
It probably measures the time between transmission, and the reciept of an ACK(nowledgement). Of course, you'd think a really bogged down machine with a USB Wifi adapter could concievably return ACKs a little slow, and get dropped.
All in all, it seems like a pretty goofy idea: "Secure your WAP: artificially limit it's already meager range!"
the PMP300 I purchased featured a battery compartment that could only use Duracell batteries
Yeah, the battery compartment issue was what eventually trashed my PMP300SE as well -- it was built for a slightly longer AA battery (appearantly duracell's 'premium' electronics batteries were the only ones long enough).
Of course I didn't RTFM, so I kept wondering why my Rio shut off every time I gave it a good shake. I realized it was due to the fact that the generic rechargable AA I was using was a little loose in the compartment, so I started sticking small pieces of conductive crap in there, like aluminum foil. Long story short, after a couple years of heavy use like that, the battery compartment died on me and the damn thing's been sitting in a drawer for the last 5 years.
Depends which model you're talking about. All of the original Rio PMP300-based models took smartmedia cards. I personally spent a good $300 on a 64MB PMP300SE with an additional 32MB smart media card. God, flash was expensive in '98 :(
At any rate, I can't speak to the model you were looking at, but Rio did make expandable players.
I have never once had a showing ruined
Generally speaking, I'd agree with you. I'd never walked out of a theater in my life until this year.
I went to see "The Grudge" (what can I say, I really liked Ju-On) on a Friday at about 8 PM, about 40 miles south of San Francisco.
For the entire first 30 minutes of the film, the theater sounded like an elementary school playground. Between constant screaming (in the middle of calm scenes, for no reason other than to make noise) and constant talking, I *could not hear dialogue*. Somehow, I'd managed to find the showing all the Junior High kids were attending.
After that first half hour, I gave up and left. The manager gave me a pass, and I came back to see the same movie several days later. No problem whatsoever.
Outside of that, I encounter kids screaming, laser pointers, people shouting, and cellphones ringing maybe 10% of the time, but I generally just ignore it.
I can only assume you're fortunate enough to live somewhere where people are more courteous.
The good news is the cost of fabbing 1GB of ram keeps going down! Where ram once cost $50/meg ($50,000/gig) it now runs as low as $50/gig -- one thousandth the price of a decade or two ago. Of course, unless something changes, by the time you can pick up ram for $1/gig, we'll have 200 TB harddrives for $200. ... But hey, maybe Moore's law will fail for harddrives long before it fails for ram.
There is no such thing as a "one way mirror". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror#One-way_mirror
Wikipedia has a definition, therefore it must exist! ...In all seriousness, the article seems to indicate partially reflective mirrors would reflect some of a laser, and let the rest pass through. "One way mirror" is indeed a misnomer.
Once you stray into obscure topics, the net sometimes fails miserably. For example, there's next to nothing on Zoroastrianism. The Community College's library had hundreds of times more on the subject than the net. Sure, there are all the C, C++, Java, PHP, Ruby, MySQL, C#, VB, 8086 machine code, FORTRAN and Comadore 64 assembly resources you could ever want -- but that's because people who care about those things are on the net. There's not a large Zoroastrian community, however.