If the traveller in PTSP eventually reaches a maximum speed, then I think any Euclidean TSP can be solved using PTSP by blowing up the distances far enough. (I assume Euclidean TSP uses euclidean distances, rounded to the nearest integer, which means the second best solution cannot come arbitrarily close to the best solution).
Really? Millions of users who used megaupload for backups, or for distributing their own material and nothing else, _and_ who have no other copy of the data? Might the submitter be just slightly exaggerating?
I thought the point of the actual mathematical problem was to mathematically conclude the best possible path, with the understanding that it wouldn't be real-world achievable but that one would use that as a guideline to strive for.
The point of the mathematical problem was being a mathematical problem. In real life, you would first not look at the distance, but at the cost (taking into account fuel, wear and tear, cost of the time spent, tolls etc. ). You would consider that the cost of going from A to B is often not the same as the cost going from B to A. You would consider that the cost will depend on the time of day. You will consider that there are other restrictions (be at X anytime before launch, be back at the base before 6pm). If a truck makes delivery, there might be advantages of getting rid of a heavy load early, so the cost would go down after visiting some point X.
So the result of the mathematical problem will likely not be nearly as good as some rather simple heuristic with real life data.
Last I knew the "pure" problem was "Hard" because it counted minor variants that were off by a mile as "invalid answers". Whereas the "Approximations" came out really fast because in the real world you didn't care about an extra time.
I recommend a variant: "Real time travelling salesman": You have a set of points, a starting point, and the times to travel between the points in second. You start a computer program which outputs the points to visit in the order they are visited. Here's what makes it "real time": You can start travelling to the each point only when the computer has output that point. The computer program can continue working on the next point while driving.
The traveling salesman problem is based on a table of distances between the city pairs. It doesn't matter to the problem HOW those distances are calculated, or even if they include other variables. So this can be trivially reduced to the classic version of the problem.
It's not quite as simple. The distance between two destinations is not fixed. The time to get from A to B depends on the speed and direction when you arrived at A or passed through A, and the speed and direction that you want to have when arriving at B.
A lot of people are not aware of this, but restrictions on the after-purchase use of products has been tried for just about everything under the sun, including hammers and shovels. Courts have consistently held that the manufacturer or supplier has no right to restrict the use of a product after it is purchased. Zero. Even if it is on the front of the package in bold print.
For software, what you buy is a license and the ability to install the software, and that is what you can resell. Due to the first sale doctrine, the license cannot disallow resale (a clause "you may install this software on one, and only one, computer owned by the original purchaser of the license" would be invalid). There are certain other things that a software license cannot disallow, but most license restrictions have regularly been upheld in court.
There is also the problem that if you plunk down the money, you haven't bought the product yet. If it says somewhere "sale requires that you accept the license terms" then it isn't sold until you accept the license terms, which means on the other hand that you can ask for your money back if you don't agree (not agreeing means there was no sale yet, so you have no right to copy the software).
At the end of the day, Youtube holds all the cards. It's the most visited video delivery site on the planet. You can be sure that if 80 million Germans suddenly found a message saying "Because of your courts and GEMA you will no longer be able to use YouTube", it wouldn't be long before GEMA came crawling back begging.
Your logic escapes me. The GEMA is not interested in how many people watch Youtube. They are interested in how much money is generated by Youtube for the music industry. Google, on the other hand, would have a massive loss of advertising income.
Right now a station with 6 double-sided pumps can service 12 cars at a time. 12 cars every 5 minutes is 144 cars per hour. If charging takes 1/2 an hour, you'd need 72 chargers to maintain the same number of customers. How many gas stations have room for 72 parking spots?
My local supermarket has its own petrol station. It also has a few hundred parking spots. Would be quite simple: You park your car, plug it in, do your shopping, and pay for the electricity with your shopping. Details can be worked out easily. But in the end, if I _can_ charge at home overnight, there isn't that much demand for extra charging.
What makes you think the truth would be somewhere in the middle? That would mean there are two liars. We know there is one liar, but what evidence do you have that there are two?
Sort of like Samsung saying "how about we do away with this lawsuit and just discount price of the massive amount of memory you're buying from us?"
Samsung is a big company. The Samsung vice president of memory would tell the Samsung vice president of tablet design to f*** off if he were asked to sell memory to Apple cheaper. That's _his_ profit and _his_ bonus on the line, and he won't give that up because some other vice president had to produce a tablet design that gets them sued.
I still cannot understand why very technical inventions (such as 3G and GSM) can only be licensed under FRAND conditions, but fluff like 'slide to unlock' (have that in my toilet) or rounded corner ("they are everywhere!") yield massive license income.. I would really love to see this before a judge so we can finally get this mess cleaned up for good.
Explanation: Some patents are part of a standard, and everybody _must_ use them to use that standard. If one company with patents used in the 3G standard for example refused to license their patents, then they would have a monopoly. If two companies refused to license their patents, then we would have no 3G phones. Therefore, whenever some standard is created, everyone has to agree to license their patents under FRAND conditions. If you refuse, they will change the standard so that your patents are not part of it.
"Slide to unlock" is not _required_ by anybody. You can build a perfectly nice phone without using that patent. "Rounded corners" on the other hand is not something that is patented, or patentable, and referring to it seems to indicate that you are a bit clueless. You can get a design patent for a design which consists of many, many design elements, and only someone copying that combination of design elements would be infringing. I can get a design patent for a phone that has A, B, C, D and E, and you would then be free to create a phone that has A, C, D and E, but not B.
Though there always exceptions, programmers tend to be relatively socially awkward lot. It comes out in our jokes, in our dress, in our environment. (Ask your co-worker chuckling, "That's what she said...", wearing a video game t-shirt, with Star Wars figure strewn about his cube, as he hums the "Ocarina of Time" while coding....)
I suppose when you say "our" jokes etc. you are talking about the developers that _your_ company is hiring. Maybe it's not just women that are turned off, but mentally adult programmers in general.
That was my first thought too. If Canada Post is truly claiming copyright on apost code DB, then where do you draw the line?
Very simple. They should have the copyright on their postcode database, so nobody should be allowed to copy their database without licensing it. However, anybody else should be allowed to independently collect the information and create their own independent postcode database.
As much as I think the idea of copyrighting post codes is stupid, surely the source of the data doesn't matter.
Excuse me, but copyright is about copying. So the source is most important. If the source is a list of postcodes from the post office, then it is copyright infringement. If the source is thousands of people entering their location and postcode on a website, then it's not.
Plus: When this happened a bunch of motor magazines tried braking when the car was under full throttle and the brakes won. Every time. Even with muscle cars. cite [caranddriver.com]
At that time a Mercedes engineer was interviewed, saying that on every Mercedes the brakes are about four times stronger than the engine. Even on a Mercedes with 400 horse powers. The only thing that you mustn't do is trying to drive on using the brakes to stop the car accelerating; that will destroy the brakes through heat; in the long term the engine wins. So if your car tries to run away, hit the brakes hard until the car stops and therefore the engine stalls if it is still in gear.
While the media wing may not be what is losing money today, it is their Big Media stake that is ruining the electronics company.
Apple made billions and billions selling iPods. That could have been Sony instead, but their media business made sure that Sony music players couldn't play any music from Sony Media for fear there could be any illegal copying.
Sony could have made ten times more by selling tons of music players and give away all Sony music for free to their customers.
So, those employers that demand access to your social networking accounts, or, say, bank accounts, personal e-mail accounts, etc. They get a free pass at violating those sites' Terms of Use and can sign on with employees' access credentials... NO PROBLEM?
Not at all. If I give you my Facebook password, then I am in violation of the Facebook TOS - which as discussed is not a crime. But _you_ have no authorization to log into my account. I can give you the password, but I cannot give you the authorization to log in, because it is not my server that you are logging in to. So by accessing my account, using the password I gave you, _you_ are committing the crime of unauthorized access to a computer.
To apply this same idea to meatspace. If I rent an apartment and my lease says no pets but I have a pet anyway should that make me a criminal? I don't think so.
Let's make that a bit clearer. If your lease says "no pets" but you have a pet anyway, does that make you a trespasser? No. You live there, and as long as you live there you are not a trespasser. You may be in violation of your rent agreement, and the landlord may use this to cancel your tenancy agreement, and then ask you to leave, and if you don't leave the landlord may send bailiffs to remove you, but until they remove you, you are not trespassing.
On the other hand, you might take your pet rat on a walk, and when you come home you find the locks changed and a notice on the door - if you then break into what used to be your apartment you would be trespassing. Back to cyber space: If you have a Facebook account and you violate their TOS: No crime. If Facebook cancels your account and you hack into their servers to get the account back: Criminal.
We have osX which is still lackluster at best at context switches (still, after over a decade with negligible improvement)...
You moan about MacOS X being "lacklustre at context switches", while I enjoy the ease with which Grand Central Dispatch and blocks allow me to create multithreaded applications.
You say "everyone is telling you to make it open source". Well, I don't, so it's not everyone. But why are they telling you this? One advantage of open source is that these people can build on your work without paying you. Wait - that is an advantage for everyone except you!
Just ask yourself: What is in it for me? Assuming that you have a husband or wife and two children and want a nice home and decent food on the table for everyone, and a good education for your children, what's the best way to achieve this?
The two advantages _for you_ from open source are these: You can use open source software made by others as part of your software (and in that case we don't need to discuss this because you _must_ open source your software), and that others may add value to your software by contributing. On the other hand, anyone can take your software without paying you. If the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, you open source it, otherwise you don't.
This guy's way of encouraging new ideas from the employees is a good one. But publishing the failures on a website runs the risk of the website becoming a 'wall of shame' instead of being seen as a reward for having presented the idea in the first place.
Here's a simple question: How much does a failure cost you, and how much does a success make you? If I come up with an idea that was good enough that it _might_ work and create a million dollars profit, and the company spends $10,000 figuring out that it doesn't work and why, and you come up with no idea at all, who do you think is more likely to come up eventually with an idea that works?
That's a pretty terrible law as described. Short of calling emergency personnel (no real need to stop to do that), the average person is likely to make a situation WORSE by trying to help. Unless a car is on fire and you're pulling people away from danger (at which point you are putting yourself IN danger, which seems unlikely to be required by law), a person without medical training may likely aggravate injuries by failing to handle an injured person properly and/or injure themselves in the process of trying to help.
That's why I had to do a first aid training course in order to get my driving license. Within a few hours you can get just enough training to keep a person alive until someone with real medical experience appears on the screen.
On the other hand, I was told this definition of a civilized country: In a civilized country, when you see a traffic accident, you stop and help. In an uncivilized country, you don't stop. By this definition, the USA is not a civilized country.
Now, while the quoted paragraphs state that you may be able to demand compensation even after the warranty has expired, it says nothing about EU-wide 2 year warranty... which seems odd if such a thing exists.
If there really is that kind of law, could some kind soul tell me where to find it?
I suppose that isn't actually the law text. With all these laws, you have to read the complete text. And the devil is in the details. Your country should have laws that make the seller responsible for selling products that last a reasonable amount of time and are not defective when you received it. A crucial bit of information is who has to prove things; in many countries the rule is that if something breaks within 6 months then the seller has to prove it wasn't their fault, and after 6 months it's the other way round.
Having a 1 year warranty on a phone made sense back when mobile contracts typically lasted 1 year...
But now that mobile contracts are typically 2 years, it should be a legal requirement that any warranty last for at least as long as the contract terms if not longer.
In the UK, products have to last for "a reasonable amount of time", with "reasonable" depending on the product and circumstances. If a phone company sells a phone together with a contract, then I would say it is "reasonable" that the phone should work for at least the time of the contract. No need for a specific requirement. If you bought an iPhone from a phone company with a five year contract, then you can reasonably expect it to last five years, and they should fix faults for five years. (Apple may think different, but then it isn't their problem. They wouldn't have to pay for repairs).
Slashdot Mirror
If the traveller in PTSP eventually reaches a maximum speed, then I think any Euclidean TSP can be solved using PTSP by blowing up the distances far enough. (I assume Euclidean TSP uses euclidean distances, rounded to the nearest integer, which means the second best solution cannot come arbitrarily close to the best solution).
Really? Millions of users who used megaupload for backups, or for distributing their own material and nothing else, _and_ who have no other copy of the data? Might the submitter be just slightly exaggerating?
I thought the point of the actual mathematical problem was to mathematically conclude the best possible path, with the understanding that it wouldn't be real-world achievable but that one would use that as a guideline to strive for.
The point of the mathematical problem was being a mathematical problem. In real life, you would first not look at the distance, but at the cost (taking into account fuel, wear and tear, cost of the time spent, tolls etc. ). You would consider that the cost of going from A to B is often not the same as the cost going from B to A. You would consider that the cost will depend on the time of day. You will consider that there are other restrictions (be at X anytime before launch, be back at the base before 6pm). If a truck makes delivery, there might be advantages of getting rid of a heavy load early, so the cost would go down after visiting some point X.
So the result of the mathematical problem will likely not be nearly as good as some rather simple heuristic with real life data.
Last I knew the "pure" problem was "Hard" because it counted minor variants that were off by a mile as "invalid answers". Whereas the "Approximations" came out really fast because in the real world you didn't care about an extra time.
I recommend a variant: "Real time travelling salesman": You have a set of points, a starting point, and the times to travel between the points in second. You start a computer program which outputs the points to visit in the order they are visited. Here's what makes it "real time": You can start travelling to the each point only when the computer has output that point. The computer program can continue working on the next point while driving.
The traveling salesman problem is based on a table of distances between the city pairs. It doesn't matter to the problem HOW those distances are calculated, or even if they include other variables. So this can be trivially reduced to the classic version of the problem.
It's not quite as simple. The distance between two destinations is not fixed. The time to get from A to B depends on the speed and direction when you arrived at A or passed through A, and the speed and direction that you want to have when arriving at B.
A lot of people are not aware of this, but restrictions on the after-purchase use of products has been tried for just about everything under the sun, including hammers and shovels. Courts have consistently held that the manufacturer or supplier has no right to restrict the use of a product after it is purchased. Zero. Even if it is on the front of the package in bold print.
For software, what you buy is a license and the ability to install the software, and that is what you can resell. Due to the first sale doctrine, the license cannot disallow resale (a clause "you may install this software on one, and only one, computer owned by the original purchaser of the license" would be invalid). There are certain other things that a software license cannot disallow, but most license restrictions have regularly been upheld in court.
There is also the problem that if you plunk down the money, you haven't bought the product yet. If it says somewhere "sale requires that you accept the license terms" then it isn't sold until you accept the license terms, which means on the other hand that you can ask for your money back if you don't agree (not agreeing means there was no sale yet, so you have no right to copy the software).
At the end of the day, Youtube holds all the cards. It's the most visited video delivery site on the planet. You can be sure that if 80 million Germans suddenly found a message saying "Because of your courts and GEMA you will no longer be able to use YouTube", it wouldn't be long before GEMA came crawling back begging.
Your logic escapes me. The GEMA is not interested in how many people watch Youtube. They are interested in how much money is generated by Youtube for the music industry. Google, on the other hand, would have a massive loss of advertising income.
Right now a station with 6 double-sided pumps can service 12 cars at a time. 12 cars every 5 minutes is 144 cars per hour. If charging takes 1/2 an hour, you'd need 72 chargers to maintain the same number of customers. How many gas stations have room for 72 parking spots?
My local supermarket has its own petrol station. It also has a few hundred parking spots. Would be quite simple: You park your car, plug it in, do your shopping, and pay for the electricity with your shopping. Details can be worked out easily. But in the end, if I _can_ charge at home overnight, there isn't that much demand for extra charging.
The truth? Probably somewhere in the middle.
What makes you think the truth would be somewhere in the middle? That would mean there are two liars. We know there is one liar, but what evidence do you have that there are two?
Sort of like Samsung saying "how about we do away with this lawsuit and just discount price of the massive amount of memory you're buying from us?"
Samsung is a big company. The Samsung vice president of memory would tell the Samsung vice president of tablet design to f*** off if he were asked to sell memory to Apple cheaper. That's _his_ profit and _his_ bonus on the line, and he won't give that up because some other vice president had to produce a tablet design that gets them sued.
I still cannot understand why very technical inventions (such as 3G and GSM) can only be licensed under FRAND conditions, but fluff like 'slide to unlock' (have that in my toilet) or rounded corner ("they are everywhere!") yield massive license income.. I would really love to see this before a judge so we can finally get this mess cleaned up for good.
Explanation: Some patents are part of a standard, and everybody _must_ use them to use that standard. If one company with patents used in the 3G standard for example refused to license their patents, then they would have a monopoly. If two companies refused to license their patents, then we would have no 3G phones. Therefore, whenever some standard is created, everyone has to agree to license their patents under FRAND conditions. If you refuse, they will change the standard so that your patents are not part of it.
"Slide to unlock" is not _required_ by anybody. You can build a perfectly nice phone without using that patent. "Rounded corners" on the other hand is not something that is patented, or patentable, and referring to it seems to indicate that you are a bit clueless. You can get a design patent for a design which consists of many, many design elements, and only someone copying that combination of design elements would be infringing. I can get a design patent for a phone that has A, B, C, D and E, and you would then be free to create a phone that has A, C, D and E, but not B.
Though there always exceptions, programmers tend to be relatively socially awkward lot. It comes out in our jokes, in our dress, in our environment. (Ask your co-worker chuckling, "That's what she said...", wearing a video game t-shirt, with Star Wars figure strewn about his cube, as he hums the "Ocarina of Time" while coding ....)
I suppose when you say "our" jokes etc. you are talking about the developers that _your_ company is hiring. Maybe it's not just women that are turned off, but mentally adult programmers in general.
That was my first thought too. If Canada Post is truly claiming copyright on apost code DB, then where do you draw the line?
Very simple. They should have the copyright on their postcode database, so nobody should be allowed to copy their database without licensing it. However, anybody else should be allowed to independently collect the information and create their own independent postcode database.
As much as I think the idea of copyrighting post codes is stupid, surely the source of the data doesn't matter.
Excuse me, but copyright is about copying. So the source is most important. If the source is a list of postcodes from the post office, then it is copyright infringement. If the source is thousands of people entering their location and postcode on a website, then it's not.
Plus: When this happened a bunch of motor magazines tried braking when the car was under full throttle and the brakes won. Every time. Even with muscle cars. cite [caranddriver.com]
At that time a Mercedes engineer was interviewed, saying that on every Mercedes the brakes are about four times stronger than the engine. Even on a Mercedes with 400 horse powers. The only thing that you mustn't do is trying to drive on using the brakes to stop the car accelerating; that will destroy the brakes through heat; in the long term the engine wins. So if your car tries to run away, hit the brakes hard until the car stops and therefore the engine stalls if it is still in gear.
While the media wing may not be what is losing money today, it is their Big Media stake that is ruining the electronics company.
Apple made billions and billions selling iPods. That could have been Sony instead, but their media business made sure that Sony music players couldn't play any music from Sony Media for fear there could be any illegal copying.
Sony could have made ten times more by selling tons of music players and give away all Sony music for free to their customers.
So, those employers that demand access to your social networking accounts, or, say, bank accounts, personal e-mail accounts, etc. They get a free pass at violating those sites' Terms of Use and can sign on with employees' access credentials ... NO PROBLEM?
Not at all. If I give you my Facebook password, then I am in violation of the Facebook TOS - which as discussed is not a crime. But _you_ have no authorization to log into my account. I can give you the password, but I cannot give you the authorization to log in, because it is not my server that you are logging in to. So by accessing my account, using the password I gave you, _you_ are committing the crime of unauthorized access to a computer.
To apply this same idea to meatspace. If I rent an apartment and my lease says no pets but I have a pet anyway should that make me a criminal? I don't think so.
Let's make that a bit clearer. If your lease says "no pets" but you have a pet anyway, does that make you a trespasser? No. You live there, and as long as you live there you are not a trespasser. You may be in violation of your rent agreement, and the landlord may use this to cancel your tenancy agreement, and then ask you to leave, and if you don't leave the landlord may send bailiffs to remove you, but until they remove you, you are not trespassing.
On the other hand, you might take your pet rat on a walk, and when you come home you find the locks changed and a notice on the door - if you then break into what used to be your apartment you would be trespassing. Back to cyber space: If you have a Facebook account and you violate their TOS: No crime. If Facebook cancels your account and you hack into their servers to get the account back: Criminal.
Ubuntu built an app store on top of their repositories recently which does both paid-for and free(as in beer in this context) software.
Where can I buy gift cards for the Ubuntu app store?
We have osX which is still lackluster at best at context switches (still, after over a decade with negligible improvement)...
You moan about MacOS X being "lacklustre at context switches", while I enjoy the ease with which Grand Central Dispatch and blocks allow me to create multithreaded applications.
You say "everyone is telling you to make it open source". Well, I don't, so it's not everyone. But why are they telling you this? One advantage of open source is that these people can build on your work without paying you. Wait - that is an advantage for everyone except you!
Just ask yourself: What is in it for me? Assuming that you have a husband or wife and two children and want a nice home and decent food on the table for everyone, and a good education for your children, what's the best way to achieve this?
The two advantages _for you_ from open source are these: You can use open source software made by others as part of your software (and in that case we don't need to discuss this because you _must_ open source your software), and that others may add value to your software by contributing. On the other hand, anyone can take your software without paying you. If the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, you open source it, otherwise you don't.
This guy's way of encouraging new ideas from the employees is a good one. But publishing the failures on a website runs the risk of the website becoming a 'wall of shame' instead of being seen as a reward for having presented the idea in the first place.
Here's a simple question: How much does a failure cost you, and how much does a success make you? If I come up with an idea that was good enough that it _might_ work and create a million dollars profit, and the company spends $10,000 figuring out that it doesn't work and why, and you come up with no idea at all, who do you think is more likely to come up eventually with an idea that works?
That's a pretty terrible law as described. Short of calling emergency personnel (no real need to stop to do that), the average person is likely to make a situation WORSE by trying to help. Unless a car is on fire and you're pulling people away from danger (at which point you are putting yourself IN danger, which seems unlikely to be required by law), a person without medical training may likely aggravate injuries by failing to handle an injured person properly and/or injure themselves in the process of trying to help.
That's why I had to do a first aid training course in order to get my driving license. Within a few hours you can get just enough training to keep a person alive until someone with real medical experience appears on the screen.
On the other hand, I was told this definition of a civilized country: In a civilized country, when you see a traffic accident, you stop and help. In an uncivilized country, you don't stop. By this definition, the USA is not a civilized country.
Now, while the quoted paragraphs state that you may be able to demand compensation even after the warranty has expired, it says nothing about EU-wide 2 year warranty... which seems odd if such a thing exists.
If there really is that kind of law, could some kind soul tell me where to find it?
I suppose that isn't actually the law text. With all these laws, you have to read the complete text. And the devil is in the details. Your country should have laws that make the seller responsible for selling products that last a reasonable amount of time and are not defective when you received it. A crucial bit of information is who has to prove things; in many countries the rule is that if something breaks within 6 months then the seller has to prove it wasn't their fault, and after 6 months it's the other way round.
Having a 1 year warranty on a phone made sense back when mobile contracts typically lasted 1 year...
But now that mobile contracts are typically 2 years, it should be a legal requirement that any warranty last for at least as long as the contract terms if not longer.
In the UK, products have to last for "a reasonable amount of time", with "reasonable" depending on the product and circumstances. If a phone company sells a phone together with a contract, then I would say it is "reasonable" that the phone should work for at least the time of the contract. No need for a specific requirement. If you bought an iPhone from a phone company with a five year contract, then you can reasonably expect it to last five years, and they should fix faults for five years. (Apple may think different, but then it isn't their problem. They wouldn't have to pay for repairs).