Research in child development clearly shows the most important factor in the well-adjustment in a child is the presence of attentive adult influence. In a situation where older (adult and nearly adult) children are the primary care providers and role models for young (infant and preschool) children, it is very possible that the younger children would receive the attention and encouragement needed to grow up as a well-adjusted adult. Thus, it is not necessarily factual that these parents are providing a deficient environment for their children- they may have found an alternative support structure for their family. However, I do not know of any studies examining the well-adjustedness of children from such large families (the vast majority study two-parent heterosexual one to three children families compared with one-parent one-to-three children families). Citations: Perry V Schwarzenegger (9th Cir. 2010) Findings of Fact 69 through 73, and discussion (ruling pages 94-96, or pages 97-99 at http://www.scribd.com/doc/35374462/California-Prop-8-Ruling-August-2010)
Haven't seen anyone mention IntelliJ Idea yet. It's Java-centric (which may be why no one's mentioned it, but people have been whining about Eclipse), it integrates more tightly between code and debugger than VisualStudio. It has a set of refactorings out-of-the box that I miss terribly when working in VS. When I can put only the properties of a class in, then generate working stubs for *all* the getters and setters in one keyboard command, I call that win. With version 9, there's an open source community edition. Pretty much the best IDE ever. Plugins galore... IntelliJ Idea is done right.
(Using classical mechanics, Google Calculator, and some rounding) 40 days, 60 million km to mars at closest approach. Spend half the time accelerating, half the time decelerating.
For acceleration: x = x0 + v0t + (at^2)/2 2 * 30 million km / (20 days) ^ 2 = 2e-2m/s^2
Let's use a Space Shuttle, 2,029,203 kg The force of the engine is F = ma = ((2 029 203 kg) * 2 * (30 million km)) / ((20 days)^2) = 40 774.5587 newtons Work along a straight line is Force time distance W = Fd = (40 774.5587 newtons) * 30 million kilometers = 1.22323676 × 10^15 joules Power is work over time P = W/t = 1.22323676 × ((10^15) joules)) / (20 days) = 0.707891644 gigawatts Of course, we need to do this twice: Ptotal = 2P = 2 * 0.707891644 gigawatts = 1.41578329 gigawatts
Which is surprisingly close to the power needed to propel a DeLorean through time...
Note that this is only the power needed to get the ship to Mars and then stop it; I have no idea the efficiency of their engine, life support, etc, but hey, the math works close enough for me.
I'm a little weak on my power generation math- anyone who knows something about solar panels and PV arrays want to take a shot at the power requirements?
>It doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out that a GC-based, VM-based language that has layers of intermediate execution is going to be slower >than is required for a trading system. What I don;t get is that MS thought they could throw hardware at it until it worked.
You're massively under-representing.Net. First, the common belief that it's nothing more than Microsoft-does-Java, never mind the C++ development tools that work to allow developers to write native, as-fast-as-you-want-as-close-to-the-machine-with-inline-assembly that interoperates cleanly with code written in VB, C#, or F#- what other platform allows you to literally mix inline assembly within functional programming? (Not saying it's a good idea, just saying it works that way). There's a reason that VisualStudio/.Net is the best tool Microsoft makes. What we actually have is a team of 15-year-olds playing with an elephant gun and an angry elephant- people get trampled, because the developers do not know how to solve their problem.
>The moral is that you don't want to use the simple-to-code MS platform when you can get a best-of-breed system, based on Linux and good engineering >for a lot less. IT managers around the world should be looking at this and thinking what similar lessons their IT departments could learn.
The moral is that it you're developing something as critical as handling all the monetary transactions of a stock exchange, you want to do your damndest to actually hire developers who know what they're doing!
Climbing is an obsession and an addiction. It can easily take over your life, especially if you are good at it. Finding your next route is like getting in your next fix. It offers the ultimate escape, diversion and self-esteem. In a sense, it is a power trip. The kind of rush you experience when your skills pay off is incredible. For some, it is a rush better than sex and drugs combined. It adds a new dimension to an otherwise mundane and seemingly predictable reality. Some perspective;)
Hunting is an obsession and an addiction. It can easily take over your life, especially if you are good at it. Finding your next deer is like getting in your next fix. It offers the ultimate escape, diversion and self-esteem. In a sense, it is a power trip. The kind of rush you experience when your skills pay off is incredible. For some, it is a rush better than sex and drugs combined. It adds a new dimension to an otherwise mundane and seemingly predictable reality. Some perspective
Running is an obsession and an addiction. [...] Finding your next route is like getting in your next fix. [...] Some perspective
Fly fishing is an obsession and an addiction. Finding your next hole is like getting in your next fix. [...] Some perspective
Skiing is an obsession and an addiction. Finding your next hill is like getting in your next fix. [...] Some perspective
From the original data, "Windows" and "Microsoft" are synonymous, unless Windows is specified as Vista, XP, or 2000. The actual data is as follows:
Windows XP 66.31% Windows Vista 20.45% MacIntel 6.51% Mac OS 2.35% Windows 2000 1.56% Linux 0.83% Windows NT 0.77% iPhone 0.37% Windows 98 0.29% Windows ME 0.17% Windows CE 0.05% Pike 0.05% Unknown 0.05% iPod 0.05% Series60 0.03% Hiptop 0.03% PLAYSTATION 3 0.02% PSP 0.02% Windows 95 0.01% SunOS 0.01% Nintendo Wii 0.01% Win64 0.01% FreeBSD 0.01% Wi 0.00%
They claim these are actual usage statistics (presumably from net usage, so already a bit dubious regarding older systems), not sales statistics. It looks like MacOS and MacIntel are "Apple"- I'm assuming MacOS is everything not running on Intel chips, and MacIntel is the newer OSX versions. They seem to group everything "linux" as anything with the Linux kernel. Again, these are net machines, so there's no accounting for server usage. Hate to say it, but this is not the Year of the Linux Desktop. This is more likely the Year of the Apple Anti-trust Lawsuit.
" As a result, it tends to get waved away as "magic" or "this will be explained later" but there's so much waved away that the students get disconnected. For instance, to simply output a line to a command line in Java you're looking at System.out.println("output"); whereas with c++ (for instance) you have cout "output" endl; As someone who's teaching this stuff, the second is easier to explain in detail and doesn't rely on saying "don't worry what System.out is". "
I think both have an equal amount of hand-waving.
System is a class that contains many useful run-time features your program can use. The out property is a way to write to the console. The println method of the System.out reference is a way to write text or other objects to the standard out, with an appended new line. If it gets passed an object, it calls the object's toString method first, giving each object control over how to display itself
The is an operator that is overloaded by many classes. The cout overloads the operator to print to standard out. The cout itself requires a bit of hand waving. Also, you need to return an int from the main (Why? Don't worry, just return 0), you need to import a namespace, and you need to explain that endl is a magic (but platform independent) line terminator.
Guess what? There is no good language to teach computer science in. They all require a lot of hand-waving for the intro programmer. The college I go to is shifting very heavily to not using any language in the first semester of the CS program. It's entirely flowcharting and basic UML- design first. 2nd semester is Java, 3rd semester is Data Structures (using JCF). 4th semester is C and Assembler. Junior and Senior years are electives, including Architecture, Distributed, Networking, Graphics, OSes, and Compilers. Also required is an internship.
A great programmer doesn't give a rats ass about what language they're programming in. A great programmer will program into the language, using the language to the best of its ability. A great programmer will, however, choose languages and environments that give them their greatest desire: the ability to be lazy. Good CS programs will teach people how to program, not what to program. Good professors must find a way to present all aspects of CS in an appropriate fashion, and that does mean design first.
You're assuming the "wannabe crook" is actually a crook. I don't get that impression. It seems that Mom & Pop simply didn't know much about this new-fangled "Google" thing, and someone came up and said with confidence "I can make Google work for YOU!" Still not knowing about Google or the internet, Mom & Pop said "Ok, sounds good. You seem like a nice guy, and guarantee me 100% return on investment, sure I'll pay for that." Now, Crook has come close to committing fraud by mis-selling his services. Google did what Google does well- whacked the SEO (the crook). The only thing Mom & Pop should have done differently was a bit of research.
The collections are to provide a consistent design pattern to use. Strictly speaking, no you don't need the synchronized collection for events that only update the GUI, but it is good to know that a) you will need them if you're doing actual distributed or parallel computing, and b) you don't need to roll your own synchronization checks since JCF already has them.
Using an unsynchronized collection in a multi-threaded environment is always dangerous. Unless you can guarantee that only one thread will EVER read or write from that collection, you have the possibility of race, deadlock, and corruption. The JCF synchronized collections don't incur a serious performance penalty, even in distributed numerical methods applications. Always IMHO better safe than sorry.
Most important rule of thumb of multi-threaded programming is to avoid it if possible. Maybe hardware (multi-core) will change that, maybe you feel the scheduler can't do its job as well as you can and maybe you feel it's more intuitive. But, often is the case, that you're just adding more complexity to your code resulting in more difficult bugs and harder maintenance for others. Keep it simple.
I'm going to have to disagree with you on this one. Especially in Java client side rich GUI apps, background threads are one of the most useful components to ensure a responsive interface when dealing with asynchronous requests. They really only need two and a half pieces to implement them easily and efficiently. The first component is the request itself, either a subclass of java.lang.Runnable or javax.swing.SwingWorker. The second is a callback handler. The half piece is the shared data structure, and it's only a half piece because you'll want to use the synchronized collections wrapper to get a (you guessed it) synchronized collection.
Brushing up on those pieces will give you the background you need to not block the UI whenever something needs to happen. Threads aren't hard, they just take a little thought.
Actually, MapReduce doesn't do anything in the way data's stored- it's just a pipe between two sets of stored data, and really just needs an interface on both ends to get the task into MapReduce (which is what it seems the projects TFS/A mention do). BigTable is the storage mechanism that's incompatible with most traditional row-based RDBMSs. GFS is just the underlying storage mechanism.
Note that all of those were published several years ago- I'd bet dollars to donuts that Google is _WAY_ beyond this internally if it's just reaching commercial use by their competitors.
The real story here is that a person or group of programmers have designed a better algorithm for playing the game.
Not really. TFS clearly states the programmers used a Monte Carlo algorithm. To compare, the most common chess algorithm is ALpha-Beta search. The computer takes a board position, enumerates the possible moves, and prunes the tree if it finds a move worse than the best move it's found so far. The only "clever" algorithm is evaluating the positions (rather difficult in Chess). Go, OTOH, has too many possible moves ((19 ^ 2)! / (19 ^ 2 - Moves)!) or 16 702 719 120 (sixteen billion) possible boards after 4 moves. So, rather than explore the entire tree, the use Monte Carlo randomization to get a good average move, instead of the best possible move. Now, the "clever" part of the algorithm goes away, and we're left with a massively paralizable dart board. The more darts, the better a chance to get a good shot.
It only gives it the potential to be much faster (and consume more power).
The first point is entirely accurate, and the basis of modernization in legacy systems (what Joel on Software calls a Free Lunch). The second point is not valid. Processors have not gotten physically larger, which means the transistors have gotten smaller. If the transistors are smaller, there is less distance between them, which means it takes less energy to move electrons between the transistors more than making up for the power to run those extra transistors. That does make more heat, which is where the power savings go- into the cooling unit. This is also why power supplies in the past few decades really haven't change their input or output specifications- your computer uses the same amount of power it always has, jut more efficiently.
Having a greater number of transistors on a chip does not make a processor "smarter" or capable of doing something a less populated processor can.
That's for the emergent intelligence debate. Kurzweil of course disagrees strongly, whereas others (Joel on software) use that argument as a proof by contradiction advocating good software development as opposed to waiting for your computer to improve. I personally am in the second camp, though only because it makes more sense to write good code today than use Moore's law as a crutch for sloppy programming (see Vista).
Even though I'm just a fifteen minute commute from work, I spend nearly fifty dollars a week getting there and back. Not trying to argue or anything, but have you looked at investing in a bike? In most urban places, I'd expect that 4-8 minutes of that is spent waiting on traffic lights, and the other 7-11 minutes you don't get much faster than 45 MPH, 35 if your lucky. A decent street bike is under $400 new, $200 used, and $20 at a garage sale- you'll make it to work in 20 minutes at worst, and you'll have a great excuse to exercise on the way home- is the wife really going to get mad when you spend an extra 30 minutes coming home to get a great bike ride in?;) Oh, and you'll have paid off your shiny new bike in a little over 2 months in gas savings alone.
With Flash, Adobe can pull the rug out from under you any time they like, as they did with their SVG plugin. Yes, they could, but wouldn't that be a little more akin to shooting yourself in the head than throwing the baby out with the bathwater? Adobe's biggest products (read, cost to buy) are Photoshop, Premiere, and (after acquiring Macromedia) Flash. Their entire business is modeled around providing tools to build PDFs and Flash applications, and they're damned good tools. While you can bitch and moan about it being "proprietary" all you want, in the end that's what protects it- Adobe keeps and defends it as proprietary, and that's how they stay in business. Sorry, Flash is here for the long run.
You'll also stay current in supercomputing, RIAA tactics, IP infringement, Video Games, Astronomy, Physics, Puzzles, and *nix flamewars. You might not, however, stay current on your workload.
The site is probably just a reverse proxy with a few filters to insert ads, maybe embed malicious content, insert some junk text, white on white, and the site owners probably hope that when people are looking for info using a search engine, that they will mistake the site for the real Wikipedia. Yeah, but like the real Wikipedia, can this one survive the Slashdot effect? Let's find out! Nope. Wikipedia already cut their access. This is an awesome new form of slashdotting...
1. Proxy someone else's site 2. Add Ads 3. Slashdot 4. Owners of original site block your IP from theirs. 5. NO Profit!
Slashdot Mirror
Welcome to the Microsoft Enrichment Center, featuring GLaDOS, now running Windows 7!
What's next, the back button?
Yep.
From http://mozillalabs.com/conceptseries/2011/05/24/community-concepts-ubiquitous-firefox-part-1-how-do-you-design-a-debris-less-browser/
Next time, I want to revisit the Back and Forward buttons more deeply, to rethink the way they’ve functioned since their inception
I trust Democrats to lie, cheat, steal, and have sex scandals.
I trust Republicans to lie, cheat, steal, murder foreigners, and have gay sex scandals.
Research in child development clearly shows the most important factor in the well-adjustment in a child is the presence of attentive adult influence. In a situation where older (adult and nearly adult) children are the primary care providers and role models for young (infant and preschool) children, it is very possible that the younger children would receive the attention and encouragement needed to grow up as a well-adjusted adult. Thus, it is not necessarily factual that these parents are providing a deficient environment for their children- they may have found an alternative support structure for their family. However, I do not know of any studies examining the well-adjustedness of children from such large families (the vast majority study two-parent heterosexual one to three children families compared with one-parent one-to-three children families). Citations: Perry V Schwarzenegger (9th Cir. 2010) Findings of Fact 69 through 73, and discussion (ruling pages 94-96, or pages 97-99 at http://www.scribd.com/doc/35374462/California-Prop-8-Ruling-August-2010)
Haven't seen anyone mention IntelliJ Idea yet. It's Java-centric (which may be why no one's mentioned it, but people have been whining about Eclipse), it integrates more tightly between code and debugger than VisualStudio. It has a set of refactorings out-of-the box that I miss terribly when working in VS. When I can put only the properties of a class in, then generate working stubs for *all* the getters and setters in one keyboard command, I call that win. With version 9, there's an open source community edition. Pretty much the best IDE ever. Plugins galore... IntelliJ Idea is done right.
Let's run the math:
(Using classical mechanics, Google Calculator, and some rounding)
40 days, 60 million km to mars at closest approach.
Spend half the time accelerating, half the time decelerating.
For acceleration:
x = x0 + v0t + (at^2)/2
2 * 30 million km / (20 days) ^ 2 = 2e-2m/s^2
Let's use a Space Shuttle, 2,029,203 kg
The force of the engine is
F = ma = ((2 029 203 kg) * 2 * (30 million km)) / ((20 days)^2) = 40 774.5587 newtons
Work along a straight line is Force time distance
W = Fd = (40 774.5587 newtons) * 30 million kilometers = 1.22323676 × 10^15 joules
Power is work over time
P = W/t = 1.22323676 × ((10^15) joules)) / (20 days) = 0.707891644 gigawatts
Of course, we need to do this twice:
Ptotal = 2P = 2 * 0.707891644 gigawatts = 1.41578329 gigawatts
Which is surprisingly close to the power needed to propel a DeLorean through time...
Note that this is only the power needed to get the ship to Mars and then stop it; I have no idea the efficiency of their engine, life support, etc, but hey, the math works close enough for me.
I'm a little weak on my power generation math- anyone who knows something about solar panels and PV arrays want to take a shot at the power requirements?
>It doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out that a GC-based, VM-based language that has layers of intermediate execution is going to be slower >than is required for a trading system. What I don;t get is that MS thought they could throw hardware at it until it worked.
You're massively under-representing .Net. First, the common belief that it's nothing more than Microsoft-does-Java, never mind the C++ development tools that work to allow developers to write native, as-fast-as-you-want-as-close-to-the-machine-with-inline-assembly that interoperates cleanly with code written in VB, C#, or F#- what other platform allows you to literally mix inline assembly within functional programming? (Not saying it's a good idea, just saying it works that way). There's a reason that VisualStudio/.Net is the best tool Microsoft makes. What we actually have is a team of 15-year-olds playing with an elephant gun and an angry elephant- people get trampled, because the developers do not know how to solve their problem.
>The moral is that you don't want to use the simple-to-code MS platform when you can get a best-of-breed system, based on Linux and good engineering >for a lot less. IT managers around the world should be looking at this and thinking what similar lessons their IT departments could learn.
The moral is that it you're developing something as critical as handling all the monetary transactions of a stock exchange, you want to do your damndest to actually hire developers who know what they're doing!
Candidate for President:
Barack Obama
John McCain
Stephen Colbert
Write in:
>>Robert'); DROP TABLE Votes;--
Climbing is an obsession and an addiction. It can easily take over your life, especially if you are good at it. Finding your next route is like getting in your next fix. It offers the ultimate escape, diversion and self-esteem. In a sense, it is a power trip. The kind of rush you experience when your skills pay off is incredible. For some, it is a rush better than sex and drugs combined. It adds a new dimension to an otherwise mundane and seemingly predictable reality. Some perspective ;)
Hunting is an obsession and an addiction. It can easily take over your life, especially if you are good at it. Finding your next deer is like getting in your next fix. It offers the ultimate escape, diversion and self-esteem. In a sense, it is a power trip. The kind of rush you experience when your skills pay off is incredible. For some, it is a rush better than sex and drugs combined. It adds a new dimension to an otherwise mundane and seemingly predictable reality. Some perspective
Running is an obsession and an addiction. [...] Finding your next route is like getting in your next fix. [...] Some perspective
Fly fishing is an obsession and an addiction. Finding your next hole is like getting in your next fix. [...] Some perspective
Skiing is an obsession and an addiction. Finding your next hill is like getting in your next fix. [...] Some perspective
Shall I continue?
From the original data, "Windows" and "Microsoft" are synonymous, unless Windows is specified as Vista, XP, or 2000. The actual data is as follows:
Windows XP 66.31%
Windows Vista 20.45%
MacIntel 6.51%
Mac OS 2.35%
Windows 2000 1.56%
Linux 0.83%
Windows NT 0.77%
iPhone 0.37%
Windows 98 0.29%
Windows ME 0.17%
Windows CE 0.05%
Pike 0.05%
Unknown 0.05%
iPod 0.05%
Series60 0.03%
Hiptop 0.03%
PLAYSTATION 3 0.02%
PSP 0.02%
Windows 95 0.01%
SunOS 0.01%
Nintendo Wii 0.01%
Win64 0.01%
FreeBSD 0.01%
Wi 0.00%
From:
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10
They claim these are actual usage statistics (presumably from net usage, so already a bit dubious regarding older systems), not sales statistics. It looks like MacOS and MacIntel are "Apple"- I'm assuming MacOS is everything not running on Intel chips, and MacIntel is the newer OSX versions. They seem to group everything "linux" as anything with the Linux kernel. Again, these are net machines, so there's no accounting for server usage. Hate to say it, but this is not the Year of the Linux Desktop. This is more likely the Year of the Apple Anti-trust Lawsuit.
"
As a result, it tends to get waved away as "magic" or "this will be explained later" but there's so much waved away that the students get disconnected. For instance, to simply output a line to a command line in Java you're looking at
System.out.println("output");
whereas with c++ (for instance) you have
cout "output" endl;
As someone who's teaching this stuff, the second is easier to explain in detail and doesn't rely on saying "don't worry what System.out is".
"
I think both have an equal amount of hand-waving.
System is a class that contains many useful run-time features your program can use. The out property is a way to write to the console. The println method of the System.out reference is a way to write text or other objects to the standard out, with an appended new line. If it gets passed an object, it calls the object's toString method first, giving each object control over how to display itself
The is an operator that is overloaded by many classes. The cout overloads the operator to print to standard out. The cout itself requires a bit of hand waving. Also, you need to return an int from the main (Why? Don't worry, just return 0), you need to import a namespace, and you need to explain that endl is a magic (but platform independent) line terminator.
Guess what? There is no good language to teach computer science in. They all require a lot of hand-waving for the intro programmer. The college I go to is shifting very heavily to not using any language in the first semester of the CS program. It's entirely flowcharting and basic UML- design first. 2nd semester is Java, 3rd semester is Data Structures (using JCF). 4th semester is C and Assembler. Junior and Senior years are electives, including Architecture, Distributed, Networking, Graphics, OSes, and Compilers. Also required is an internship.
A great programmer doesn't give a rats ass about what language they're programming in. A great programmer will program into the language, using the language to the best of its ability. A great programmer will, however, choose languages and environments that give them their greatest desire: the ability to be lazy. Good CS programs will teach people how to program, not what to program. Good professors must find a way to present all aspects of CS in an appropriate fashion, and that does mean design first.
You're assuming the "wannabe crook" is actually a crook. I don't get that impression. It seems that Mom & Pop simply didn't know much about this new-fangled "Google" thing, and someone came up and said with confidence "I can make Google work for YOU!" Still not knowing about Google or the internet, Mom & Pop said "Ok, sounds good. You seem like a nice guy, and guarantee me 100% return on investment, sure I'll pay for that." Now, Crook has come close to committing fraud by mis-selling his services. Google did what Google does well- whacked the SEO (the crook). The only thing Mom & Pop should have done differently was a bit of research.
Or the Kennedy family, or hell, the Adams family.
The collections are to provide a consistent design pattern to use. Strictly speaking, no you don't need the synchronized collection for events that only update the GUI, but it is good to know that a) you will need them if you're doing actual distributed or parallel computing, and b) you don't need to roll your own synchronization checks since JCF already has them.
Using an unsynchronized collection in a multi-threaded environment is always dangerous. Unless you can guarantee that only one thread will EVER read or write from that collection, you have the possibility of race, deadlock, and corruption. The JCF synchronized collections don't incur a serious performance penalty, even in distributed numerical methods applications. Always IMHO better safe than sorry.
Most important rule of thumb of multi-threaded programming is to avoid it if possible. Maybe hardware (multi-core) will change that, maybe you feel the scheduler can't do its job as well as you can and maybe you feel it's more intuitive. But, often is the case, that you're just adding more complexity to your code resulting in more difficult bugs and harder maintenance for others. Keep it simple.
I'm going to have to disagree with you on this one. Especially in Java client side rich GUI apps, background threads are one of the most useful components to ensure a responsive interface when dealing with asynchronous requests. They really only need two and a half pieces to implement them easily and efficiently. The first component is the request itself, either a subclass of java.lang.Runnable or javax.swing.SwingWorker. The second is a callback handler. The half piece is the shared data structure, and it's only a half piece because you'll want to use the synchronized collections wrapper to get a (you guessed it) synchronized collection.
Brushing up on those pieces will give you the background you need to not block the UI whenever something needs to happen. Threads aren't hard, they just take a little thought.
At first blush this sounds like a high-tech form of seeing if the witch can float.
Ah. So it's a machine to determine if she's made of wood?
No. It's a machine to determine if she's a duck, or at least lighter than a duck.
Actually, MapReduce doesn't do anything in the way data's stored- it's just a pipe between two sets of stored data, and really just needs an interface on both ends to get the task into MapReduce (which is what it seems the projects TFS/A mention do). BigTable is the storage mechanism that's incompatible with most traditional row-based RDBMSs. GFS is just the underlying storage mechanism.
http://labs.google.com/papers/gfs.html
http://labs.google.com/papers/bigtable.html
http://labs.google.com/papers/mapreduce-osdi04.pdf
Note that all of those were published several years ago- I'd bet dollars to donuts that Google is _WAY_ beyond this internally if it's just reaching commercial use by their competitors.
The real story here is that a person or group of programmers have designed a better algorithm for playing the game.
Not really. TFS clearly states the programmers used a Monte Carlo algorithm. To compare, the most common chess algorithm is ALpha-Beta search. The computer takes a board position, enumerates the possible moves, and prunes the tree if it finds a move worse than the best move it's found so far. The only "clever" algorithm is evaluating the positions (rather difficult in Chess). Go, OTOH, has too many possible moves ((19 ^ 2)! / (19 ^ 2 - Moves)!) or 16 702 719 120 (sixteen billion) possible boards after 4 moves. So, rather than explore the entire tree, the use Monte Carlo randomization to get a good average move, instead of the best possible move. Now, the "clever" part of the algorithm goes away, and we're left with a massively paralizable dart board. The more darts, the better a chance to get a good shot.
It only gives it the potential to be much faster (and consume more power).
The first point is entirely accurate, and the basis of modernization in legacy systems (what Joel on Software calls a Free Lunch). The second point is not valid. Processors have not gotten physically larger, which means the transistors have gotten smaller. If the transistors are smaller, there is less distance between them, which means it takes less energy to move electrons between the transistors more than making up for the power to run those extra transistors. That does make more heat, which is where the power savings go- into the cooling unit. This is also why power supplies in the past few decades really haven't change their input or output specifications- your computer uses the same amount of power it always has, jut more efficiently.
Having a greater number of transistors on a chip does not make a processor "smarter" or capable of doing something a less populated processor can.
That's for the emergent intelligence debate. Kurzweil of course disagrees strongly, whereas others (Joel on software) use that argument as a proof by contradiction advocating good software development as opposed to waiting for your computer to improve. I personally am in the second camp, though only because it makes more sense to write good code today than use Moore's law as a crutch for sloppy programming (see Vista).
Historians speculate that if someone could get it to boot up, it would run faster than a modern PC running Vista!
CowboyNeal can run a marathon faster than a vista PC can boot. It'll take more than that to impress me.
Telemarketers that choose to ignore the DNC list promptly get sued, as both you and the article point out.
Phenomenal Internet Solutions, huh? With a simple
$ nslookup yourdomainnamegoeshere.com
Server: 216.187.160.17
you would have found at that YOU SHOULD F*ING USE example.com !!!
You'll also stay current in supercomputing, RIAA tactics, IP infringement, Video Games, Astronomy, Physics, Puzzles, and *nix flamewars. You might not, however, stay current on your workload.
1. Proxy someone else's site
2. Add Ads
3. Slashdot
4. Owners of original site block your IP from theirs.
5. NO Profit!
No ??? needed.