A successful mission WOULD be a launch, do something, land. To most people this won't be newsworthy, and it looks like 'minor achievements' - but that's exactly what the shuttle was designed to do. I'm not sure what other 'successes' the shuttle could possibly have.
Really, it comes down to what you WANTED to achieve. Yes, there were a couple of tragic shuttle accidents, but how many successful missions were there? Yes, the missions have cost billions, but how much would the same missions in some other transport have cost?
Space travel isn't going to be safe, OR cheap with our current level of technology. The shuttle was designed 30 years ago. Yes, it could do with being redesigned, and from some points of view it could be called a failure, but IMV it expanded our knowledge of space transport/exploration far beyond what could have been achieved with other equipment of the time - eg having a "fully controlled" re-entry and landing is far beyond what was achieved previously, and what will be possible with the next generation 'Orion' craft. Without the shuttle, we could have speculated that this was possible, but now we KNOW it is.
Given NASA's 'new vision' (Orion) seems to be to have a modified Saturn launch vehicle with modified Apollo modules on it, that seems like a big step *backwards* in 'experimentation' - the lawyers have won!
But, back to the original article - I can't see the point, they're flying it to the ISS *and back* (they're not 'launching it into space' as such, just carrying it there and back on the shuttle). Why? It's purely a publicity stunt. I suppose 'why not?' is just as good a question...
When I last had a battery powered watch, it could easily be replaced by any of a zillion shops in the local town for a couple of pounds and 5 minutes (I don't need to send it off to the manufacturer with a £30 cheque and wait a week or two..)
I could even spend 10 minutes and open the back myself and replace the battery myself for less than a pound (which is what I did when I was a student). The "special tool" needed to open the back could be substituted for a little screwdriver and a bit of effort. Once the back is off, the battery would just drop out and could be replaced in a tick with a 'standard' sized battery, and then the back screwed back on.
This is quite different from something which needs special tools to remove the back AND soldering to remove and replace the battery, and a battery which can only be bought from Apple.
Although I didn't want the iPhone before (I hate iTunes, and anything related to it) I certainly don't now. I do have a spare phone without a user-replaceable battery, but the phone just cost £25 (without a contract) - that's a bit different from a £400 phone....
Does this mean the iPhone will soon be illegal in Europe?
AIUI, there's an EU law coming in in 2008 meaning that all batteries have to be at least user-removeable (so they can be disposed of separately) even if not user-replaceable.
No, the owner of the software ISN'T you.. Just like, with music, the owner of the music ISN'T you. You have purchased the right to use it.
I think the clue to the disagreement here is at the bottom of the wikipedia article on 'licence-free' software. There it essentially says "you can use licence free software legally in the US, but not in many places, such as the UK, where copyright law is subtly different".
In the UK, you *can't* copy software to a PC's hard disk or memory without a licence allowing you to do so. This is actually the same as in many countries. In the UK you *can't* copy a copyrighted piece of material for personal use, that is illegal. (See here).
So, in the UK and many other countries, all software MUST have a licence with it, for it to be of any use whatsoever. This is true, even if the licence is a free licence saying 'you can do what you want with this software', that isn't implied, it has to be expressly stated.
> Compare that to when a religious person has a belief, and he does everything in his power to prevent people from proving it wrong.
This isn't entirely fair.
Take the creationist here. A creationist can come up with explanations for anything that evolutionists can argue. The only problem is that a creationist cannot prove that the creator exists. Without the ability to prove that, the evolutionist will just say that everything the creationist says is 'blind faith'. The evolutionist can often come up with plausible explanations for things, which don't require a creator, but despite popular belief this actually does NOT prove that they are right, just that this is a plausible theory as well.
Evolutionists are reasonably good at classifying evidence which contradicts them as 'measurement errors' or 'freaks of nature', just as creationists can ignore evidence as well.
In essence, both creationism and evolutionism are beliefs. Until we can invent a time machine, we can't PROVE either one correct.
You can't prove a creationist wrong, unless you can prove that there is no creator. This comes down to belief. This may be 'unscientific' (there's no test we can do to prove whether there is a creator or not), but it's not reasonable to say that because it's not scientific it must be wrong. Lots of things can't be proven but are correct.
You could potentially prove an evolutionist wrong, but the scientific community is so far against that, that any scientist who tried to do so would lose his credibility and livelihood immediately, regardless of what evidence he had. That's how strongly the evolutionist community's *faith* is.
One common problem is that nowadays people equate "evolution" with "natural selection". They are not the same. Most creationists know that natural selection exists, and it is consistent with a creationist theory. People can often see natural selection in the world around us, but we don't often see evolution, although it is called that sometimes in the popular press.
- Why couldn't a creator have created photons between the furthest objects and us?
- How do you KNOW the objects are 13 billion light years away? Have you measured it with a tape measure? We use methods to measure objects that distant which can't possibly be proved with our current state of technology. They might be right, they may not. We ASSUME they're right, because there's no evidence that they're wrong, but we can't know for certain. Closer objects (100's of light years) we can measure using parallax, which is reasonably proven, but further objects use different methods which are more dubious.
- There's the previously mentioned expanding universe idea. This can answer the problem as well.
- If the speed of light WAS changing, I'm not sure how that would stop a PC working.... If electrons travelled at the speed of light (they don't) then all that would happen is the PC would slow down over time (Hmm, that happens with most Windows PCs anyway.. Maybe that's proof light is slowing down;) )
BTW - there IS evidence that the speed of light has decreased over the last few hundred years. Whether you accept it or not is up to you... If you refuse to consider it, how are you better than the creationists you are slagging off?
I have seen this evidence sited before, and it is quite hard to refute. If it was solely due to measurement errors, then you'd expect a wide scattering of data points around the current measurements, with the scattering getting closer together over time (sort of like a ">" symbol). In fact, it's a reasonable consistent decrease in speed (from around 300,000 km/sec in 1730's to 299,792 km/sec now), like a \ symbol but not as steep.
Looking at wikipedia's article on Orion it looks like a major step backwards. If that article is up to date, the Orion is nothing like the shuttle. It's more like the service module & command module from the Apollo spacecraft. So, all that comes back down to Earth with the crew is a little cone.
So, given that, I can see that it wouldn't have much space spare for EMUs.
However, it can carry '4 to 6' astronauts. So, I can't see why, if it happens to be coming down with just 4 astronauts, they couldn't put a couple of EMUs in the empty seats....
It does seem like a massive step back in technology. It's not going to be able to be used for all the jobs that the shuttle can be used for, such as launching satellites & doing maintenance work on them etc, but a lot of that can be done using unmanned craft now. Basically Orion is limited to being only a crew vehicle, whereas the shuttle was a cargo vehicle with lots of flexibility. I guess Orion will be a lot cheaper to run though.
There's an interesting article on Wikipedia about licence-free software which is software which is released without a proper licence at all. The article does mention the difficulties which can arise because of this (eg it might be possible to use it legally in some countries, but not others - because there is no licence allowing you to use it).
>If you own a photocopier, you can legally copy an entire book you legally own
In the UK this is definitely not the case. I'm not sure it is in the US either. It doesn't seem to be covered by any of the 'fair use' rules, so if it is allowed, it might not be because of 'fair use'
Here's another example of legal fair use: Recording TV shows...You paid for it, you can play it as much as you want to
No, you can record it for time shifting only. At least in the UK, you can record it, and watch it later, but then you must delete it. You are not allowed to keep an archive of recorded TV shows; doing so is against the copyright laws.
Are you sure that copying the software to your PC is 'fair use'?
According to copyright.gov:
"The 1961 Report of the Register of Copyrights on the General Revision of the U.S. Copyright Law cites examples of activities that courts have regarded as fair use: quotation of excerpts in a review or criticism for purposes of illustration or comment; quotation of short passages in a scholarly or technical work, for illustration or clarification of the author's observations; use in a parody of some of the content of the work parodied; summary of an address or article, with brief quotations, in a news report; reproduction by a library of a portion of a work to replace part of a damaged copy; reproduction by a teacher or student of a small part of a work to illustrate a lesson; reproduction of a work in legislative or judicial proceedings or reports; incidental and fortuitous reproduction, in a newsreel or broadcast, of a work located in the scene of an event being reported."
In general, when I've seen agreement on 'fair use', it has nearly always referred to just snippets of the original used for 'critique' style purposes.
Wikipedia has a similar definition of 'fair use'.
Also note that "fair use" is a US specific amendment to copyright law, although the UK does have something similar.
IANAL and all that, but I thought you had an EULA for *software* not for the PC. OK this may cover the OS for the software, but that's fine, it's not the PC itself.
I thought EULAs were required for software, because copyright law prevents you from doing anything at all with the software unless one is there. Eg, if you 'copy' (ie install) the software onto your PC, you're copying the software, so breaking copyright law. The EULA is a *LICENCE* which grants you extra rights (such as being able to use the software) which aren't otherwise allowed. The EULA can thus be used to restrict when those EXTRA rights are possible. It can't restrict things which are required to be allowed by law (eg it can't say 'if the CD is faulty, we won't replace it', because that's required by law in most places).
But, with a PC, you're not breaking any law by using it, so why do you need an EULA?
OK, you could have a CONTRACT, but that's not a LICENCE, so the mere fact that Gateway are calling this an EULA sounds like some lawyer somewhere has got it wrong.
By definition, a LICENCE lets you do something you couldn't otherwise do.
But, this was no way a 'one off' crime, done in the heat of passion etc.
His crimes were well planned, and considered and over an extended period of time. He explicitly chose to do them.
They affected millions of people. OK, maybe it's difficult to quantify the damage, but if you think how much time, money and effort has been spent on fighting people like him (all those spam filter programs written and bought). There's also all the extra bandwidth used which has probably increased the costs of internet access for everyone to compensate. Never mind all the resources (electricity, time, Internet fees) that he stole from the people unwittingly on his botnets. Then there's the fraudulent nature of much of the spam as well.
If anything, I think the fine should be in the millions or tens of millions rather than quarter of a million, and possibly 30-40 years in prison, but it does need to be considerable. This wasn't just someone who misguidedly sent out a few spam messages one weekend - it's a calculating career spammer, fraudster and computer hijacker.
If nothing else, he should be used as an example, and he's got no-one else to blame but himself for it.
I have far more sympathy for someone who killed someone in a 'crime of passion' than for this man!
The "problem" with Devs playing the game isn't going to be that big an issue in one of the many games where PvE is the main reason for playing, as I doubt any sensible person would care that a Dev was an uber-wizard with with 300 pet dragons who could kill orcs by looking at them, as long as they played sensibly and didn't get in other players' ways.
However, Eve is basically a 'kill anyone, and screw everyone you can' type game. This can actually be reasonably good fun if you're that sort of person, but quite often people can take it personally. Not only that, but people are encouraged to get into alliances, and fight other alliances.
So, now, your uber-Dev has a problem. Does he stay out of alliances and the large PvP battles that ensue? This is probably safer for the 'integrity' of the game, however, now he's not experiencing a big part of the game. But, as soon as he joins an alliance, there is an obvious benefit to that alliance.
I'd say that CCP should ban devs from playing in alliances for extended periods of time, and announce when they are playing in them for short periods for testing purposes. Possibly they could also 'share out' devs to the different big alliances. (They could even write this into the story 'notorious militarist xyz is lending aid to abc alliance for a week')
An uber-dev playing outside an alliance in Eve would have quite a hard time doing anything seriously untoward (without using 'secret keys'), as he could get "pwned" by pretty much any other mid->large group who took offence.
Flash memory is no good because it has a limited number of write cycles (typically about 10,000 - after which it becomes 'random'. If a swap file was on flash memory, it'd soon die..)
RamSan is an alternative - very fast, no moving parts - as used by the database servers for the Eve Online MMORPG.
The only drawback is cost... And they're not totally solid state - if you get a power cut, the batteries last long enough to write the data to internal hard disks. I suppose potentially these hard disks could be replaced by flash memory since it won't be written to that often (compared with a normal PC's hard disk)
For now, hard disks far beat anything else for cost per MB, reliability and data density.
The XBox360 and PS3 are really just like the XBox and PS2 but with extra processing & graphics power. Not a lot else. The Wii is quite different from anything before due to the control system and the 'ethos' of the games designed for it. IMV, the Wii is probably more 'next-gen' than the XBox360 and PS3, which are just like the previous gen with bigger bits.
I've got both an XBox360 and a Wii, and I like them both for the things they're good at. Graphics-wise the XBox360 wins hands now, no argument, but for 'fun' (especially if you want something other than a FPS or sports game) the Wii wins easily. (The PS3 just isn't worth buying at the moment for me).
Most people who's been playing computer games for a while will know there's more to an enjoyable game than fancy graphics - on a good game they are pretty much incidental. Heck, I've played crude ASCII graphics MMORPGs which were far more fun and "immersive" than some MMORPGs out today.
Lots of other people have come up with this idea and discarded it because it doesn't work.
Either Google asked the question incorrectly, the person posting the message remembered it incorrectly (if you had 12MB, or if they were 7 digit numbers your answer would be right), or it's a LOT harder than any question I'd expect to be asked in a phone interview. The other two questions are reasonable, but this one has no decent answer. There are answers (using compression, storing deltas, using memory partitioning etc) but they'd be horribly inefficient to sort and quite complex. If you HAD to do it, you'd probably have to come up with several possible methods and try them out to see which works best, as they're all going to be slow, but it isn't obvious which method would be the least slow. (In reality, you'd go out and buy more memory and/or a hard disk...)
I'd just come up with the delta idea which I was going to write as another response.
Anyway, I don't think you'd need to worry about only being able to handle 24287 gaps of 65536 or more. If you have 1526 gaps of 65536 you've run out of 8 digit numbers. So, your idea is OK, AFAICS.
You could be more efficient by having variable length encoding for the deltas (similar to UTF8 encoding, but more efficient) - I reckon you could store the data in (worst case) about 1.7MB if you did that (773437 deltas of 129 needing 2 bytes, the rest deltas of 1)
No, my idea only works with (any number of unique) 7 digit numbers - ie there are less than 16 million possible numbers - basically you build a bitmap of all the used numbers, and they're automatically sorted with zero effort. It won't work with any number of arbitrary 8 digit numbers, as that needs 100,000,000 bits to be available - approx 12MB.
I can't see how a tree could be used to solve the problem. A tree node typically consists of 2 pointers, and a lump of data. If you have 1 million nodes then you have only 2 bytes per node. Given there's 1 million nodes, your pointers need to be 20 bits, so each node needs 5 bytes just for the pointers, plus some data saying WHAT phone number this node is. I can't see that working.
OK, I might be missing something, but I don't know what.
AFAICS A better way would be just to use a simple insert sort (not quick, but it uses far less memory), and it may be doable by using some rudimentary form of compression, but it would need a bit of design work.
> Three requires you to realise that the numbers are unique, within a finite range, and you have sufficient *bits* for a radix sort.
Do you? At the risk of looking dumb, how's that work then?
If they were 7 digit numbers it's trivial, but I can't see it with 8 digit numbers. I need 100,000,000 bits for that, and I've only got 16,000,000 bits. Unless there's a trick I can't think of at the moment.
(PS - it doesn't say the numbers were unique. It's quite plausible for a set of phone numbers to contain duplicates, but that may just have been bad memory by the poster, or bad wording by the interviewer)
Not that it matters - because you've only got 2 marbles. So, you can't test for a bigger number than the one you're looking for more than twice. If it was 49 you'd be OK, your marbles would break at 50 and 49. But, if 51 was the answer you'd be scuppered - your marbles would break at 50 and 75, and then what do you do?
The answer is to go up in steps, then when the first marble breaks go back a step and go up in ones.
(Sorry, didn't mean 256 bytes, I meant 2048 bytes)
Re:I had an interview with Google a few weeks ago
on
Want To Work At Google?
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Woah! You had to answer those questions on the phone whilst he was talking to you?
Unless this is the sort of thing you've been doing before, it's unlikely you'd be able to do that - I'd have expected you'd need some time to work out the answers. I know I would, and I've been programming for 25+ years.
The first question is quite easy to answer -ish. I guess they meant 'as efficiently as possible' - not as 'effectively as possible' (in which case, as long as you got the right answer you'd meet the requirements). To get the basic concept isn't hard, but to get it "as efficiently as possible" you'd need some thought, which would be hard on the phone. (You go up in steps (eg 10 floors at a time) until the first marble breaks, then go back a step and go up one floor at a time until the second marble breaks - the "hard" bit is knowing what size steps to use for the first part to be most efficient)
BTW - the second question there was a bit meaningless - how can you 'sort a 100MB file'? Do they want the file in byte order (all the 0 bytes first, then all the 1 bytes) If so, then you could do that with 256 bytes of data RAM... Maybe they want it in BIT order - that would only need 8 bytes:) If this isn't what they want, then it would help to know WHAT you are sorting - eg a radix sort could be good here, but it might depend on the type of data
Were you allowed to ask how much memory was taken up by the OS, network stack and what programming language you were using to guess how much memory was taken up by the program?
For the 3rd question I'd have difficulty. AFAICS you'd have to use some form of compression to be able to do it (you have to hold 8M characters in 2M RAM - you could convert the phone numbers to 'real' numbers, but that'd still be 4MB in 2MB RAM). I reckon I'd be able to do it, but I'd guess it would take at least several hours to work out the nitty gritty - which sounds dumb for a phone interview.. (There's a cool way I can think of that would sort up to 10 million 7 digit numbers in 2MB RAM - but it would need 12MB to sort any number of 8 digit numbers - and this would rely on the numbers being unique, which isn't specified)
Could I offer to donate £50 from my first pay cheque to buy Google some more RAM?;)
That's the downside (from the RIAA's point of view).
You still have to pay composers' royalties, and the cost of bandwidth, hardware, purchasing the music etc in the first place, so, if you get no revenue at all, you'll be spending a lot of your own money.
Webcasters already do broadcast at low quality - eg 128kbps.
A CD is about 1,400kbps - that's over 10 times more quality than a webcaster transmits on a typical 'high quality' stream.
According to Wikipedia, 96kbps is 'FM quality', so a 128kbps stream isn't that much higher, and the 64kbps stream that lots of webcasters use is actually lower quality than FM radio by this metric...
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But... OTOH
A successful mission WOULD be a launch, do something, land. To most people this won't be newsworthy, and it looks like 'minor achievements' - but that's exactly what the shuttle was designed to do. I'm not sure what other 'successes' the shuttle could possibly have.
Really, it comes down to what you WANTED to achieve. Yes, there were a couple of tragic shuttle accidents, but how many successful missions were there? Yes, the missions have cost billions, but how much would the same missions in some other transport have cost?
Space travel isn't going to be safe, OR cheap with our current level of technology. The shuttle was designed 30 years ago. Yes, it could do with being redesigned, and from some points of view it could be called a failure, but IMV it expanded our knowledge of space transport/exploration far beyond what could have been achieved with other equipment of the time - eg having a "fully controlled" re-entry and landing is far beyond what was achieved previously, and what will be possible with the next generation 'Orion' craft. Without the shuttle, we could have speculated that this was possible, but now we KNOW it is.
Given NASA's 'new vision' (Orion) seems to be to have a modified Saturn launch vehicle with modified Apollo modules on it, that seems like a big step *backwards* in 'experimentation' - the lawyers have won!
But, back to the original article - I can't see the point, they're flying it to the ISS *and back* (they're not 'launching it into space' as such, just carrying it there and back on the shuttle). Why? It's purely a publicity stunt. I suppose 'why not?' is just as good a question...
When I last had a battery powered watch, it could easily be replaced by any of a zillion shops in the local town for a couple of pounds and 5 minutes (I don't need to send it off to the manufacturer with a £30 cheque and wait a week or two ..)
I could even spend 10 minutes and open the back myself and replace the battery myself for less than a pound (which is what I did when I was a student). The "special tool" needed to open the back could be substituted for a little screwdriver and a bit of effort. Once the back is off, the battery would just drop out and could be replaced in a tick with a 'standard' sized battery, and then the back screwed back on.
This is quite different from something which needs special tools to remove the back AND soldering to remove and replace the battery, and a battery which can only be bought from Apple.
Although I didn't want the iPhone before (I hate iTunes, and anything related to it) I certainly don't now. I do have a spare phone without a user-replaceable battery, but the phone just cost £25 (without a contract) - that's a bit different from a £400 phone....
Does this mean the iPhone will soon be illegal in Europe?
AIUI, there's an EU law coming in in 2008 meaning that all batteries have to be at least user-removeable (so they can be disposed of separately) even if not user-replaceable.
I think the clue to the disagreement here is at the bottom of the wikipedia article on 'licence-free' software. There it essentially says "you can use licence free software legally in the US, but not in many places, such as the UK, where copyright law is subtly different".
In the UK, you *can't* copy software to a PC's hard disk or memory without a licence allowing you to do so. This is actually the same as in many countries. In the UK you *can't* copy a copyrighted piece of material for personal use, that is illegal. (See here).
So, in the UK and many other countries, all software MUST have a licence with it, for it to be of any use whatsoever. This is true, even if the licence is a free licence saying 'you can do what you want with this software', that isn't implied, it has to be expressly stated.
This isn't entirely fair.
Take the creationist here. A creationist can come up with explanations for anything that evolutionists can argue. The only problem is that a creationist cannot prove that the creator exists. Without the ability to prove that, the evolutionist will just say that everything the creationist says is 'blind faith'. The evolutionist can often come up with plausible explanations for things, which don't require a creator, but despite popular belief this actually does NOT prove that they are right, just that this is a plausible theory as well.
Evolutionists are reasonably good at classifying evidence which contradicts them as 'measurement errors' or 'freaks of nature', just as creationists can ignore evidence as well.
In essence, both creationism and evolutionism are beliefs. Until we can invent a time machine, we can't PROVE either one correct.
You can't prove a creationist wrong, unless you can prove that there is no creator. This comes down to belief. This may be 'unscientific' (there's no test we can do to prove whether there is a creator or not), but it's not reasonable to say that because it's not scientific it must be wrong. Lots of things can't be proven but are correct.
You could potentially prove an evolutionist wrong, but the scientific community is so far against that, that any scientist who tried to do so would lose his credibility and livelihood immediately, regardless of what evidence he had. That's how strongly the evolutionist community's *faith* is.
One common problem is that nowadays people equate "evolution" with "natural selection". They are not the same. Most creationists know that natural selection exists, and it is consistent with a creationist theory. People can often see natural selection in the world around us, but we don't often see evolution, although it is called that sometimes in the popular press.
- Why couldn't a creator have created photons between the furthest objects and us?
- How do you KNOW the objects are 13 billion light years away? Have you measured it with a tape measure? We use methods to measure objects that distant which can't possibly be proved with our current state of technology. They might be right, they may not. We ASSUME they're right, because there's no evidence that they're wrong, but we can't know for certain. Closer objects (100's of light years) we can measure using parallax, which is reasonably proven, but further objects use different methods which are more dubious.
- There's the previously mentioned expanding universe idea. This can answer the problem as well.
- If the speed of light WAS changing, I'm not sure how that would stop a PC working.... If electrons travelled at the speed of light (they don't) then all that would happen is the PC would slow down over time (Hmm, that happens with most Windows PCs anyway.. Maybe that's proof light is slowing down ;) )
BTW - there IS evidence that the speed of light has decreased over the last few hundred years. Whether you accept it or not is up to you... If you refuse to consider it, how are you better than the creationists you are slagging off?
I have seen this evidence sited before, and it is quite hard to refute. If it was solely due to measurement errors, then you'd expect a wide scattering of data points around the current measurements, with the scattering getting closer together over time (sort of like a ">" symbol). In fact, it's a reasonable consistent decrease in speed (from around 300,000 km/sec in 1730's to 299,792 km/sec now), like a \ symbol but not as steep.
So, given that, I can see that it wouldn't have much space spare for EMUs.
However, it can carry '4 to 6' astronauts. So, I can't see why, if it happens to be coming down with just 4 astronauts, they couldn't put a couple of EMUs in the empty seats....
It does seem like a massive step back in technology. It's not going to be able to be used for all the jobs that the shuttle can be used for, such as launching satellites & doing maintenance work on them etc, but a lot of that can be done using unmanned craft now. Basically Orion is limited to being only a crew vehicle, whereas the shuttle was a cargo vehicle with lots of flexibility. I guess Orion will be a lot cheaper to run though.
Which is precisely the reason software licences exist..
See the first paragraph on this Wikipedia article
There's an interesting article on Wikipedia about licence-free software which is software which is released without a proper licence at all. The article does mention the difficulties which can arise because of this (eg it might be possible to use it legally in some countries, but not others - because there is no licence allowing you to use it).
>If you own a photocopier, you can legally copy an entire book you legally own
In the UK this is definitely not the case. I'm not sure it is in the US either. It doesn't seem to be covered by any of the 'fair use' rules, so if it is allowed, it might not be because of 'fair use'
Here's another example of legal fair use: Recording TV shows ...You paid for it, you can play it as much as you want to
No, you can record it for time shifting only. At least in the UK, you can record it, and watch it later, but then you must delete it. You are not allowed to keep an archive of recorded TV shows; doing so is against the copyright laws.
According to copyright.gov:
"The 1961 Report of the Register of Copyrights on the General Revision of the U.S. Copyright Law cites examples of activities that courts have regarded as fair use: quotation of excerpts in a review or criticism for purposes of illustration or comment; quotation of short passages in a scholarly or technical work, for illustration or clarification of the author's observations; use in a parody of some of the content of the work parodied; summary of an address or article, with brief quotations, in a news report; reproduction by a library of a portion of a work to replace part of a damaged copy; reproduction by a teacher or student of a small part of a work to illustrate a lesson; reproduction of a work in legislative or judicial proceedings or reports; incidental and fortuitous reproduction, in a newsreel or broadcast, of a work located in the scene of an event being reported."
In general, when I've seen agreement on 'fair use', it has nearly always referred to just snippets of the original used for 'critique' style purposes. Wikipedia has a similar definition of 'fair use'.
Also note that "fair use" is a US specific amendment to copyright law, although the UK does have something similar.
I thought EULAs were required for software, because copyright law prevents you from doing anything at all with the software unless one is there. Eg, if you 'copy' (ie install) the software onto your PC, you're copying the software, so breaking copyright law. The EULA is a *LICENCE* which grants you extra rights (such as being able to use the software) which aren't otherwise allowed. The EULA can thus be used to restrict when those EXTRA rights are possible. It can't restrict things which are required to be allowed by law (eg it can't say 'if the CD is faulty, we won't replace it', because that's required by law in most places).
But, with a PC, you're not breaking any law by using it, so why do you need an EULA?
OK, you could have a CONTRACT, but that's not a LICENCE, so the mere fact that Gateway are calling this an EULA sounds like some lawyer somewhere has got it wrong.
By definition, a LICENCE lets you do something you couldn't otherwise do.
His crimes were well planned, and considered and over an extended period of time. He explicitly chose to do them.
They affected millions of people. OK, maybe it's difficult to quantify the damage, but if you think how much time, money and effort has been spent on fighting people like him (all those spam filter programs written and bought). There's also all the extra bandwidth used which has probably increased the costs of internet access for everyone to compensate. Never mind all the resources (electricity, time, Internet fees) that he stole from the people unwittingly on his botnets. Then there's the fraudulent nature of much of the spam as well.
If anything, I think the fine should be in the millions or tens of millions rather than quarter of a million, and possibly 30-40 years in prison, but it does need to be considerable. This wasn't just someone who misguidedly sent out a few spam messages one weekend - it's a calculating career spammer, fraudster and computer hijacker.
If nothing else, he should be used as an example, and he's got no-one else to blame but himself for it.
I have far more sympathy for someone who killed someone in a 'crime of passion' than for this man!
The "problem" with Devs playing the game isn't going to be that big an issue in one of the many games where PvE is the main reason for playing, as I doubt any sensible person would care that a Dev was an uber-wizard with with 300 pet dragons who could kill orcs by looking at them, as long as they played sensibly and didn't get in other players' ways. However, Eve is basically a 'kill anyone, and screw everyone you can' type game. This can actually be reasonably good fun if you're that sort of person, but quite often people can take it personally. Not only that, but people are encouraged to get into alliances, and fight other alliances. So, now, your uber-Dev has a problem. Does he stay out of alliances and the large PvP battles that ensue? This is probably safer for the 'integrity' of the game, however, now he's not experiencing a big part of the game. But, as soon as he joins an alliance, there is an obvious benefit to that alliance. I'd say that CCP should ban devs from playing in alliances for extended periods of time, and announce when they are playing in them for short periods for testing purposes. Possibly they could also 'share out' devs to the different big alliances. (They could even write this into the story 'notorious militarist xyz is lending aid to abc alliance for a week') An uber-dev playing outside an alliance in Eve would have quite a hard time doing anything seriously untoward (without using 'secret keys'), as he could get "pwned" by pretty much any other mid->large group who took offence.
RamSan is an alternative - very fast, no moving parts - as used by the database servers for the Eve Online MMORPG.
The only drawback is cost... And they're not totally solid state - if you get a power cut, the batteries last long enough to write the data to internal hard disks. I suppose potentially these hard disks could be replaced by flash memory since it won't be written to that often (compared with a normal PC's hard disk)
For now, hard disks far beat anything else for cost per MB, reliability and data density.
I've got both an XBox360 and a Wii, and I like them both for the things they're good at. Graphics-wise the XBox360 wins hands now, no argument, but for 'fun' (especially if you want something other than a FPS or sports game) the Wii wins easily. (The PS3 just isn't worth buying at the moment for me).
Most people who's been playing computer games for a while will know there's more to an enjoyable game than fancy graphics - on a good game they are pretty much incidental. Heck, I've played crude ASCII graphics MMORPGs which were far more fun and "immersive" than some MMORPGs out today.
For instance, you drop a marble from floor 10, it's OK
So, you drop a marble from floor 13, it breaks
Now, according to your algorithm, you drop a marble from floor 12. Let's say this breaks.
So, is floor 10 the last safe floor, or is floor 11 - you can't tell! The marble might have broken if you dropped it from floor 11 or it might not...
After the drop from floor 13 has failed, you MUST go down to try 11, then 12 in that order. Nothing else will work.
How big does your array 'A' need to be?
How much memory do you have?
...
Lots of other people have come up with this idea and discarded it because it doesn't work.
Either Google asked the question incorrectly, the person posting the message remembered it incorrectly (if you had 12MB, or if they were 7 digit numbers your answer would be right), or it's a LOT harder than any question I'd expect to be asked in a phone interview. The other two questions are reasonable, but this one has no decent answer. There are answers (using compression, storing deltas, using memory partitioning etc) but they'd be horribly inefficient to sort and quite complex. If you HAD to do it, you'd probably have to come up with several possible methods and try them out to see which works best, as they're all going to be slow, but it isn't obvious which method would be the least slow. (In reality, you'd go out and buy more memory and/or a hard disk...)
Anyway, I don't think you'd need to worry about only being able to handle 24287 gaps of 65536 or more. If you have 1526 gaps of 65536 you've run out of 8 digit numbers. So, your idea is OK, AFAICS.
You could be more efficient by having variable length encoding for the deltas (similar to UTF8 encoding, but more efficient) - I reckon you could store the data in (worst case) about 1.7MB if you did that (773437 deltas of 129 needing 2 bytes, the rest deltas of 1)
No, my idea only works with (any number of unique) 7 digit numbers - ie there are less than 16 million possible numbers - basically you build a bitmap of all the used numbers, and they're automatically sorted with zero effort. It won't work with any number of arbitrary 8 digit numbers, as that needs 100,000,000 bits to be available - approx 12MB.
I can't see how a tree could be used to solve the problem. A tree node typically consists of 2 pointers, and a lump of data. If you have 1 million nodes then you have only 2 bytes per node. Given there's 1 million nodes, your pointers need to be 20 bits, so each node needs 5 bytes just for the pointers, plus some data saying WHAT phone number this node is. I can't see that working.
OK, I might be missing something, but I don't know what.
AFAICS A better way would be just to use a simple insert sort (not quick, but it uses far less memory), and it may be doable by using some rudimentary form of compression, but it would need a bit of design work.
Do you? At the risk of looking dumb, how's that work then?
If they were 7 digit numbers it's trivial, but I can't see it with 8 digit numbers. I need 100,000,000 bits for that, and I've only got 16,000,000 bits. Unless there's a trick I can't think of at the moment.
(PS - it doesn't say the numbers were unique. It's quite plausible for a set of phone numbers to contain duplicates, but that may just have been bad memory by the poster, or bad wording by the interviewer)
50, 25, 37, 43, 46, 48, 49 (or similar)
Not that it matters - because you've only got 2 marbles. So, you can't test for a bigger number than the one you're looking for more than twice. If it was 49 you'd be OK, your marbles would break at 50 and 49. But, if 51 was the answer you'd be scuppered - your marbles would break at 50 and 75, and then what do you do?
The answer is to go up in steps, then when the first marble breaks go back a step and go up in ones.
The 'debate' is what size steps to use?
(Sorry, didn't mean 256 bytes, I meant 2048 bytes)
Unless this is the sort of thing you've been doing before, it's unlikely you'd be able to do that - I'd have expected you'd need some time to work out the answers. I know I would, and I've been programming for 25+ years.
The first question is quite easy to answer -ish. I guess they meant 'as efficiently as possible' - not as 'effectively as possible' (in which case, as long as you got the right answer you'd meet the requirements). To get the basic concept isn't hard, but to get it "as efficiently as possible" you'd need some thought, which would be hard on the phone. (You go up in steps (eg 10 floors at a time) until the first marble breaks, then go back a step and go up one floor at a time until the second marble breaks - the "hard" bit is knowing what size steps to use for the first part to be most efficient)
BTW - the second question there was a bit meaningless - how can you 'sort a 100MB file'? Do they want the file in byte order (all the 0 bytes first, then all the 1 bytes) If so, then you could do that with 256 bytes of data RAM... Maybe they want it in BIT order - that would only need 8 bytes :) If this isn't what they want, then it would help to know WHAT you are sorting - eg a radix sort could be good here, but it might depend on the type of data
Were you allowed to ask how much memory was taken up by the OS, network stack and what programming language you were using to guess how much memory was taken up by the program?
For the 3rd question I'd have difficulty. AFAICS you'd have to use some form of compression to be able to do it (you have to hold 8M characters in 2M RAM - you could convert the phone numbers to 'real' numbers, but that'd still be 4MB in 2MB RAM). I reckon I'd be able to do it, but I'd guess it would take at least several hours to work out the nitty gritty - which sounds dumb for a phone interview.. (There's a cool way I can think of that would sort up to 10 million 7 digit numbers in 2MB RAM - but it would need 12MB to sort any number of 8 digit numbers - and this would rely on the numbers being unique, which isn't specified)
Could I offer to donate £50 from my first pay cheque to buy Google some more RAM? ;)
You still have to pay composers' royalties, and the cost of bandwidth, hardware, purchasing the music etc in the first place, so, if you get no revenue at all, you'll be spending a lot of your own money.
A CD is about 1,400kbps - that's over 10 times more quality than a webcaster transmits on a typical 'high quality' stream.
According to Wikipedia, 96kbps is 'FM quality', so a 128kbps stream isn't that much higher, and the 64kbps stream that lots of webcasters use is actually lower quality than FM radio by this metric...
No one is arguing about that, songwriter royalties have always been paid, and everyone pays the same, and no one seems to be upset by that.
It is wrong that web radio is viewed differently - that's why this bill is called the 'Internet Radio Equality Act'