Check your math, please
on
Does P = NP?
·
· Score: 2
Parallel computers are neat, but I think you're overstating the benefits just a tad:)
The best you could do, is transform your
O(n^1260) algorithm running on one processor into an O(n) algorithm running on (n^1260) processors. Even if you built self-replicating computers, n^1260 of them (for n>1) is likely to chew up a fair bit of space and energy . . .:)
Re:I'm a Maths Graduate but ...
on
Does P = NP?
·
· Score: 2
There are some problems (such as the Halting Problem) that are formally undecidable - not solvable in polynomial time even on a non-deterministic computer.
Undecidable problems are not only not solvable in polynomial time, they're not solvable - ever! If you're interested in this kind of thing, you can try reading Languages and Machines, by Thomas A. Sudkamp. It might be a bit of a struggle if you haven't done any university-level mathematics, though.
The fastest CPU on the block is incredibly expensive, and you can get a system with 90% of the performance for most things at maybe 60% of the price. It has always been so, and will remain so.
Unless you're so rich that throwing away $1000 matters nothing, don't buy the fastest CPU available for your desktop box. Spend your money on a better-quality digital video camera (if you're a video junkie), or a surround-sound speaker system (if you're a game junkie), or a 21-inch monitor. Better still, spend the money taking your partner on a holiday. Much more fun than 2 extra fps in Quake III:)
I may have been misinformed. A friend of mine went over there to work and made sure the color faded out of his hair before he arrived, so he was seriously worried about this supposed regulation. On hearing reports back from him about the good and bad features of Singapore, this kind of arbitrary interference in things that should not be the province of government seems to be commonplace. So while this one may be a furphy, it seems to be the kind of thing that they *would* do.
the imprisonment of the former Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia on trumped-up charges to keep the current Prime Minister and his corrupt cronies in power for a while longer.Amnesty International's annual report on Malaysia (the direct link doesn't work, you'll have to get to it yourself) details some of the abuses. Makes banning video arcades look pretty bloody unimportant by comparison.
The thing is.. most of Singapore's laws make *sense*.
Then perhaps you'd like to explain to me why
colouring your hair "unnatural colours" is banned?
Seriously though, it's not the vandalism laws that are worrying about Singapore, it's things like the censorship of foriegn news (thankfully, the Internet makes that far more difficult these days), the electoral jerrymander, and the abuse of the legal system to control political opponents that Singaporeans should be worried about.
A:
PawSense is sufficiently useful, novel, and unobvious
that we can patent it.
We have already filed some of the paperwork to get a patent,
and will keep this page updated as the situation develops.
We must boycott the evil PawSense writers today. They should feel the wrath of 31337 hax0rs like ourselves!
Seriously, if this gets a patent, I think we can stick this in the "ludicrous patent" basket too! Might be a handy one to point at in an argument.
Yeah, those wacky Brits. I remember seeing a documentary from the U.K. where they took infrared video of a man and woman in a state of arousal -- shades of blue to indicate cool, yellow/orange to indicate mildly warm, and reds to indicate hot.
Yeah, it was a documentary called The Human Body. They managed to cover (and show) just about everything from birth to death, including the scene you describe. It hardly felt like a porn flick, though - it was all very scientific and absolutely fascinating stuff. The most amazing shot, though, was a shot from *inside* a woman's reproductive organs as she, um . ..peaked. How they got *that* particular camera angle (and I'm sure it was real) I'll never know.
I agree with most of the prizes, but awarding the IgNoble for Medicine to the researchers who observed intercourse in an MRI machine just smacks of the same blue-nosed attitude that has been impeding sex research for years.
Note where the research was done - the Netherlands, one of the most socially liberal societies in the world. It's unfortunate that you probably couldn't do this kind of research in the English-speaking world.
If they had received funding for this, they could have hired professionals, like p0rn performers.
They may not have been good subjects for this sort of thing. If you want to generalise medical research to the general population, you've got to try and get people who are representative of that population in the area of interest. As you've alluded to, porn stars often become famous *because* their body is in some way unusual. Therefore, from a "general applicability" criterion, Mr and Mrs Joeseph Bloggs copulation is more interesting for a scientist than Mr Jeremy and half a dozen porn starlets.
I think it's pretty clear that Rob is saying what he feels. But I think it's gotten to the point where it's unprofessional. Why attack one person with name-calling in a public forum?
I think Rob has earned the right to get snaky occasionally, with all the crap he has to deal with. How would you feel if you were a lightning rod for the bruised egos of a bunch of people with so little else in their lives that they get a thrill out of spoiling everybody else's party? In any case, it's probably good to let the world know you're human occasionally. As well as making Rob feel better, if the trollers, karma whores, and other assorted idiots know that there's a real person who gets hurt feelings when they get abused, they might think a bit more about doing so.
Show me where in the all-holy GPL Red Hat is prohibited or discouraged from releasing their distro with a development grade piece of code.
Of course they can. This whole discussion is whether they should.
If those people happen to be the people at Red Hat, and they decide to put an unfinished product in their distribution, then it's their business... literally. If people don't like it, then they sure as Hell won't use it.
The trouble is that this may not make RedHat's life any more difficult, it certainly makes the job of anybody trying to ship "Linux binaries" (well, for C++ only, but the point still remains) considerably more difficult, and could conceivably encourage "Red Hat only" products to be shipped, which is the kind of stunt that we get annoyed with closed-source companies pulling. I'm not saying that this was their goal (in fact, I'm sure it wasn't), only that if they were trying to pull such a trick shipping a compiler generating non-standard binaries is one way go to about things.
Secondly, and more importantly, people are still going to complain to the gcc mailing lists about bugs in the gcc shipped with RedHat, when it's not a release that the gcc developers were prepared to stand behind, and the gcc developers will probably go nuts generating the same replies to the same problems that weren't in the stable release, aren't in the current development tree, but were in the particular snapshot that RedHat decided to use. While they might want to say "rack off and complain to RedHat" they almost certainly won't because they care about users and the good name of their product (even if it's not really theirs).
In essence, RedHat has to realize (and they probably do) that their actions affect the whole community, and their continued good name depends on them acting responsibly. Look, there may well have been compelling reasons for shipping the non-standard compiler, I'm not really qualified to comment. However, it's not an action they should have taken lightly, and it seems like they could have handled relations with the gcc developers better.
...but this seems like a typical response from a Linux Enthusiast.
"Oh oh we dont have this feature yet but it WILL be in next version....."
This is a characteristic of *all* software developers, be they RMS or Microsoft. Open source or closed-source. The difference with open-source is you can poke around in CVS and the mailing lists to find out how likely the marvellous new feature actually is, and how far away it is from appearing in a release that you'd actually consider using.
If you want a good Australian beer try Cascade Premium, and if you want the beer that we all drink get VB or XXXX.
Personally I prefer James Boag's Premium Lager. Like Cascade, it's brewed in Tasmania, and Boag's has recently been bought out by San Miguel (big Philippines-based multinational brewer) so you might actually get a chance to find the stuff overseas now. Very smooth drink.
Bullshit. You simply can't release an operating system with just one user-visible bug, no matter how good your quality control is. You just can't test every possible combination of hardware and software out there that might be used.
This will dramatically change the ways that movies are made, and which movies are made; once the revolution happens. It might make sense to give movies away, it might even make sense to pay people to go to movies, if that increases the market for the merchandising.
Unfortunately, I would think this only works for special-effects blockbusters aimed at kids and teenage males. I can't imagine the merchandising from Titus or even Being John Malkovitch amounted to much.
However, I think you may be overly pessimistic. The television has been with us for 50 years, and the video recorder for 20 or so, and movie theatres have never been doing better (at least in Australia, don't know about the states). The movies provide better picture and sound than even HDTV will, and they offer the social aspects of a night out that the TV simply can't match. Eventually, though, I suspect that broadband carriers will start subsidising content (including movie) production, to encourage downloads. The more people wish to download, the fatter pipes they can sell.
The "just reboot" attitude leads not to computer literacy, but to more ignorance and irrationality.
Precisely. When a computer crashes, there is a problem. It is not caused by cosmic rays. It is not an inevitable consequence of bits rotting. It is almost invariably the result of programmer error (hardware faults are the other possibility, but by comparison are exceedingly rare) and can and should be isolated, located, and fixed. Any other attitude is unprofessional.
I assume this was an attempt at censorship while still following the state's required reading laws.
Not necessarily. I believe that for much of the book's life in print, Anne's father (or the surviving relative that published the book, I think it was her father) censored a couple of the more sexually-charged passages. Eventually, the powers-that-be were convinced to release a new, complete, edition.
We are getting very close to the point where there will be lots of people creating things that have never existed before in nature and for which there is no natural protection. The potential for accidental or intentional mass distruction is enormous.
We've been able to wipe ourselves out for 50-odd years. Ever heard of the H-bomb?
...I'm in the process of building out a machine for myself (and several web servers). I was planning on holding out until DDR SDRAM mobos were out, since they're supposed to be such hot$hit compared to the present SDR SDRAM.
Somebody correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think you might have your priorities a bit wrong here for a webserver. Firstly, you don't stuff the very latest and greatest technology into a webserver, as it's just as likely to not be stable. Secondly, if you're serving static content, just about anything will do. Thirdly, stuffing your machine with lots of RAM and a fast hard disk is probably more important than absolute memory bandwidth.
For your own machine, stuff it with the fastest CPU, RAM and graphics accelerator you can find to build a fast Quake machine, but for webserving the priorities are just a little different.
As for Mars, we do not have the technology available right now to get there. Zubrin and co. may have designs which seem workable, but they are only designs. No one knows if generating return fuel on the Martian surface will actually work.
There's one very simple way to find out if it will work. One of the goals of Mars exploration is the "Mars Sample Return Mission" - dig up some Mars soil and Mars rocks, put it in a capsule, and send it back. Now, if you used the fuel-making techniques proposed by Zubrin for this mission, you'd get a Mars Sample Return mission done for approximately half the cost of the original mission (because instead of needing two launches and on-orbit assembly to get the mission off Earth, you could do it with one), and validate the technology for a future manned Mars mission.
I'm personally fairly confident that the fuel-making would work (the technology is fundamentally simple, and the Mars atmosphere has already been fairly well analyzed) but this is a great way to find out.
I went to a talk at which a slightly insane (even by CS standards) researcher was trying to build intelligent robots by using GA-type techniques - generate random bit-vectors as input to configure chip, evaluate behaviour, cross-breed best bit-vectors.
Unfortunately, we haven't heard any more from him, so it mustn't have worked quite as well as he hoped (making this idea work requires, amongst other things, that evaluating the utility of the present configuration be very fast - if it takes you 5 minutes to determine whether this configuration works or not, this technique obviously falls down). Still was a fascinating idea, even if it was never going to do the things he was claiming for it.
Slashdot Mirror
The best you could do, is transform your O(n^1260) algorithm running on one processor into an O(n) algorithm running on (n^1260) processors. Even if you built self-replicating computers, n^1260 of them (for n>1) is likely to chew up a fair bit of space and energy . . . :)
Undecidable problems are not only not solvable in polynomial time, they're not solvable - ever! If you're interested in this kind of thing, you can try reading Languages and Machines, by Thomas A. Sudkamp. It might be a bit of a struggle if you haven't done any university-level mathematics, though.
Unless you're so rich that throwing away $1000 matters nothing, don't buy the fastest CPU available for your desktop box. Spend your money on a better-quality digital video camera (if you're a video junkie), or a surround-sound speaker system (if you're a game junkie), or a 21-inch monitor. Better still, spend the money taking your partner on a holiday. Much more fun than 2 extra fps in Quake III :)
I may have been misinformed. A friend of mine went over there to work and made sure the color faded out of his hair before he arrived, so he was seriously worried about this supposed regulation. On hearing reports back from him about the good and bad features of Singapore, this kind of arbitrary interference in things that should not be the province of government seems to be commonplace. So while this one may be a furphy, it seems to be the kind of thing that they *would* do.
the imprisonment of the former Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia on trumped-up charges to keep the current Prime Minister and his corrupt cronies in power for a while longer.Amnesty International's annual report on Malaysia (the direct link doesn't work, you'll have to get to it yourself) details some of the abuses. Makes banning video arcades look pretty bloody unimportant by comparison.
Then perhaps you'd like to explain to me why colouring your hair "unnatural colours" is banned? Seriously though, it's not the vandalism laws that are worrying about Singapore, it's things like the censorship of foriegn news (thankfully, the Internet makes that far more difficult these days), the electoral jerrymander, and the abuse of the legal system to control political opponents that Singaporeans should be worried about.
Useful, perhaps, novel perhaps, but nonobvious? I seriously think that any teenage hacker could figure out an algorithm to do this in twenty minutes.
We must boycott the evil PawSense writers today. They should feel the wrath of 31337 hax0rs like ourselves!
Seriously, if this gets a patent, I think we can stick this in the "ludicrous patent" basket too! Might be a handy one to point at in an argument.
Yeah, it was a documentary called The Human Body. They managed to cover (and show) just about everything from birth to death, including the scene you describe. It hardly felt like a porn flick, though - it was all very scientific and absolutely fascinating stuff. The most amazing shot, though, was a shot from *inside* a woman's reproductive organs as she, um . . .peaked. How they got *that* particular camera angle (and I'm sure it was real) I'll never know.
Note where the research was done - the Netherlands, one of the most socially liberal societies in the world. It's unfortunate that you probably couldn't do this kind of research in the English-speaking world.
They may not have been good subjects for this sort of thing. If you want to generalise medical research to the general population, you've got to try and get people who are representative of that population in the area of interest. As you've alluded to, porn stars often become famous *because* their body is in some way unusual. Therefore, from a "general applicability" criterion, Mr and Mrs Joeseph Bloggs copulation is more interesting for a scientist than Mr Jeremy and half a dozen porn starlets.
I think Rob has earned the right to get snaky occasionally, with all the crap he has to deal with. How would you feel if you were a lightning rod for the bruised egos of a bunch of people with so little else in their lives that they get a thrill out of spoiling everybody else's party? In any case, it's probably good to let the world know you're human occasionally. As well as making Rob feel better, if the trollers, karma whores, and other assorted idiots know that there's a real person who gets hurt feelings when they get abused, they might think a bit more about doing so.
Besides developing their own nuclear arsenal, you mean? That tends to *mostly* deter the US :)
The trouble is that this may not make RedHat's life any more difficult, it certainly makes the job of anybody trying to ship "Linux binaries" (well, for C++ only, but the point still remains) considerably more difficult, and could conceivably encourage "Red Hat only" products to be shipped, which is the kind of stunt that we get annoyed with closed-source companies pulling. I'm not saying that this was their goal (in fact, I'm sure it wasn't), only that if they were trying to pull such a trick shipping a compiler generating non-standard binaries is one way go to about things.
Secondly, and more importantly, people are still going to complain to the gcc mailing lists about bugs in the gcc shipped with RedHat, when it's not a release that the gcc developers were prepared to stand behind, and the gcc developers will probably go nuts generating the same replies to the same problems that weren't in the stable release, aren't in the current development tree, but were in the particular snapshot that RedHat decided to use. While they might want to say "rack off and complain to RedHat" they almost certainly won't because they care about users and the good name of their product (even if it's not really theirs).
In essence, RedHat has to realize (and they probably do) that their actions affect the whole community, and their continued good name depends on them acting responsibly. Look, there may well have been compelling reasons for shipping the non-standard compiler, I'm not really qualified to comment. However, it's not an action they should have taken lightly, and it seems like they could have handled relations with the gcc developers better.
Very clever, Mr AC!
This is a characteristic of *all* software developers, be they RMS or Microsoft. Open source or closed-source. The difference with open-source is you can poke around in CVS and the mailing lists to find out how likely the marvellous new feature actually is, and how far away it is from appearing in a release that you'd actually consider using.
Personally I prefer James Boag's Premium Lager. Like Cascade, it's brewed in Tasmania, and Boag's has recently been bought out by San Miguel (big Philippines-based multinational brewer) so you might actually get a chance to find the stuff overseas now. Very smooth drink.
Bullshit. You simply can't release an operating system with just one user-visible bug, no matter how good your quality control is. You just can't test every possible combination of hardware and software out there that might be used.
Unfortunately, I would think this only works for special-effects blockbusters aimed at kids and teenage males. I can't imagine the merchandising from Titus or even Being John Malkovitch amounted to much.
However, I think you may be overly pessimistic. The television has been with us for 50 years, and the video recorder for 20 or so, and movie theatres have never been doing better (at least in Australia, don't know about the states). The movies provide better picture and sound than even HDTV will, and they offer the social aspects of a night out that the TV simply can't match. Eventually, though, I suspect that broadband carriers will start subsidising content (including movie) production, to encourage downloads. The more people wish to download, the fatter pipes they can sell.
Precisely. When a computer crashes, there is a problem. It is not caused by cosmic rays. It is not an inevitable consequence of bits rotting. It is almost invariably the result of programmer error (hardware faults are the other possibility, but by comparison are exceedingly rare) and can and should be isolated, located, and fixed. Any other attitude is unprofessional.
Not necessarily. I believe that for much of the book's life in print, Anne's father (or the surviving relative that published the book, I think it was her father) censored a couple of the more sexually-charged passages. Eventually, the powers-that-be were convinced to release a new, complete, edition.
We've been able to wipe ourselves out for 50-odd years. Ever heard of the H-bomb?
Somebody correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think you might have your priorities a bit wrong here for a webserver. Firstly, you don't stuff the very latest and greatest technology into a webserver, as it's just as likely to not be stable. Secondly, if you're serving static content, just about anything will do. Thirdly, stuffing your machine with lots of RAM and a fast hard disk is probably more important than absolute memory bandwidth.
For your own machine, stuff it with the fastest CPU, RAM and graphics accelerator you can find to build a fast Quake machine, but for webserving the priorities are just a little different.
There's one very simple way to find out if it will work. One of the goals of Mars exploration is the "Mars Sample Return Mission" - dig up some Mars soil and Mars rocks, put it in a capsule, and send it back. Now, if you used the fuel-making techniques proposed by Zubrin for this mission, you'd get a Mars Sample Return mission done for approximately half the cost of the original mission (because instead of needing two launches and on-orbit assembly to get the mission off Earth, you could do it with one), and validate the technology for a future manned Mars mission.
I'm personally fairly confident that the fuel-making would work (the technology is fundamentally simple, and the Mars atmosphere has already been fairly well analyzed) but this is a great way to find out.
Unfortunately, we haven't heard any more from him, so it mustn't have worked quite as well as he hoped (making this idea work requires, amongst other things, that evaluating the utility of the present configuration be very fast - if it takes you 5 minutes to determine whether this configuration works or not, this technique obviously falls down). Still was a fascinating idea, even if it was never going to do the things he was claiming for it.