If faster than light travel were possible then some things in the universe would have done so. If one of those things is capable of self replication then everything in existence would be copies of that thing. Maybe humans will be the first, but I find it more likely (however statistically improper that believe is) that FTL travel is impossible.
There has to be some limit to how quickly things can move or else there would be no such thing as locality.
Microsoft bought the engine that allows a bunch of high resolution pictures to be displayed over the web.
The research to find common elements in pictures and from that the location where the picture was taken was a joint project between Microsoft and University of Washington. That was not purchased from a 3rd party.
Re:Windows only.
on
Photosynth Demo
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Yep. I run Windows 2003 Server at work and it doesn't work on that either. I am pretty sure the Photosynth team wants it to run on more platforms. This is still a new product that is barely out of the research stage.
Re:The Software is AWSOME! However the delivery...
on
Photosynth Demo
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· Score: 2, Informative
Microsoft also worked with the BBC to produce this collection of Photosynths of several well known places in Britain.
In the case of the camera enabled XBox Live service, Microsoft requires that there be no evidence of a cusomter using the service while wearing no pants.
Google will be slow to jump on the nanotech bandwagon lead by IBM. Then IBM will be slow to jump on the quantum computing initiative lead by Microsoft. Then Microsoft will be slow to jump on the computronium matrioshka shell started by Google.... and so it continues onwards toward the heat death of the universe.
The cancelled TV show is an economic fight. The network says, "this shows is not profitable to produce." The fans say, "Look at how many of us there are. Surely we are large enough in numbers to make this project worthwhile." It is a simple argument that is relatively easy to quantify.
Protests against the war go something like this: P: "Stop the war! Bring our children back! We love them and miss them and don't want them to die!" G: "Your children are doing their duty to serve their country. You should be proud of them." P: "But this war is wrong. Innocent people are dieing." G: "Those people are trying to kill us. We have to kill them first. Innocent casualties are regrettable but unavoidable." P: "But the war was started on false pretenses. Those people aren't really trying to kill us." G: "Our intelligence says they are. We have more information than you do and therefore more ability to make a correct decision."
Maybe the govenment is right. Maybe the protesters are right. It is much more difficult to tell.
One way in which it is similar is that businesses involved with the war are making a lot of money. Those businesses have a lot of influence in the government. We could try to argue to those businesses that they would make more money without the war than not, but we would be wrong.
And now I'm rambling and don't know what point I'm trying to make.
Only if that cancer patient has children afterwards. If they had children before then curing them or letting them die has no effect on the future gene pool.
And it isn't really devolution. That would imply that a species becomes less fit for its environment. Just because one feature that used to be useful is disappearing does not mean that the species as a whole isn't a better fit for its environment.
Are humans "less evolved" because we lost the ability to produce Vitamin-C or because we no longer have gills?
H1B's do depress wages. If the H1B's were not available, companies would pay more for skills in short supply, students would have more incentive to gain those skills, and the imbalance would be corrected. Using foreign labor to fill the gap allows companies to pay less (because supply is increased) and creates larger skill shortages in the future.
The government uses surveys to determine what "fair market wages" are for H1B's and enforces a salary floor. This has the effect of setting a ceiling for local workers. It is another story of government mucking with the free market and making it operate less efficiently (although one could certainly argue that in a real free market there would not be any restriction on foreign labor).
Still, it does help our economy to bring the best and brightest of other counties to work in this one. We just need to make sure there is a cost difference so that companies will only hire H1B's when it is truly necessary. How can the government determine the optimal number of foreign laborers to allow while providing an incentive for companies to hire local talent.
My proposal is to auction off the H1B slots. Hold a closed bid 2nd-price style auction. Every company that wants H1B workers will enter as many bids as they want at the price they are willing to pay for the slot. The top N bids all get H1B slots but they all pay the price of the N-1 bidder. After all of the bids are placed, the government would select N to maximize revenue. All of that money would go into the Federal budget and the companies that won would be free to fill their slot with whatever H1B person they wanted (they would still have to pay market wages for that person).
Wages for local talent would be driven up by the imbalance caused by the auction and new workers would have incentive to learn the in-demand skills. Companies get the top talent that they want. The government gets a new revenue stream. Everyone in this country wins.
In downtown Austin they purposefully uncooridinate the traffic lights because they do not want downtown to be a throughfare. Instead they want slow traffic that makes the area pedestrian friendly so that businesses get more customers. Although the effect on me was that I never wanted to go downtown. Austin is weird.
Ah, I misunderstood your original intent. You were not saying there is a way to squeeze 8 digits into 2 bytes. You were saying you would have to squeeze 10 digits into two bytes and you are surprised one would be expected to know how to do that.
I agree about the unexpected input part.
(incidently, log2(100000000)=log2(100)+log2(1000)+log2(1000)~=7 +10+10 is where I got the 27 bits from).
I think you would have to implement some sort of paging system to do this. But once you start accessing the disk, efficiency goes out the window.
Suppose you made heaps around.5MB in RAM and represent each number in 4 bytes. Building a heap is average linear time. When the heap fills you write it to disk and start a new heap. Each heap will hold 131k numbers. With 1M numbers we will write 8 heaps to disk {A B C D E F G H}. Doing a merge sort on these heaps is a bit tricky.
We load two of the heaps on disk into memory and merge them into two new heaps. We only have to store one of the two new heaps in memory at a time. When the first heap fills up we just write it to disk and create a new heap. An obvious solution is to do O(N^2) merges: ((((((A+B)+C)+D)+E)+F)+G)+H) => [Min Ordered Set] + {7 partially ordered sets} Repeat for the remaining seven incompletely ordered heaps and you are done.
I suspect we can do better than O(N^2) though. The problem is if we do something like this: A+B => AB1, AB2 C+D => CD1, CD2 E+F => EF1, EF2 G+H => GH1, GH2
We know that all elements in AB1 are less than all elements in AB2, but we know nothing about the relationship between CD1 and AB2. We can't just merge AB1+CD1 and expect to get anything meaningful.
We do know that the root element on each heap is the smallest element in that heap. Since we only have 8 heaps we can store that in memory (the heaps probably have to shrink a little bit). We merge AB1 and CD1 into two heaps at once. Items that are less than AB2_min go into heap 1, items larger than AB2_min go into heap 2.
We have a new set of heaps now that are slightly better ordered. The item at the top of each heap is the smallest item in the heap. All of the items in XY1 are less than all of the items in XY2. We remember the minimum item in each of the XY2 heaps...
Crap, I just realized that is all too complicated. Just do a quick sort using pages. Create two pages each 512K in size. Choose a 9 digit number as the pivot. Assume over all time the numbers will be uniformly distributed so you choose 500000000. As each number comes in put it in heap one if it is less than the pivot and into heap 2 if it is greater than or equal to the pivot. As a page fills up then write it to disk and create a new page. In the end you will have 8-9 pages where one set of pages is less than the pivot and the other set is greater than or equal to the pivot. Start the process over, but instead of reading from the network, load a third page as your data source. Select the new pivot by sampling from the new set (which could be done during the initial processing) -- pick 10 or 20 numbers from the set and use the median as the new pivot. Worse case performance is O(N^2) but it will probably be closer to O(N*logN). Merge sort is usually guaranteed nlogn, and that is what I was trying initially, but I don't know if it will actually work with partially ordered sections like this.
Technically, you only need 27 bits per phone number so you could squeeze 6 numbers into 10 bytes with only 2 bits of entropic waste, but that sounds like a pain to work with.
Slashdot Mirror
If faster than light travel were possible then some things in the universe would have done so. If one of those things is capable of self replication then everything in existence would be copies of that thing. Maybe humans will be the first, but I find it more likely (however statistically improper that believe is) that FTL travel is impossible.
There has to be some limit to how quickly things can move or else there would be no such thing as locality.
It might shatter from the force you would need to apply to it.
Whoa! How did you get on Mars, dude?
Microsoft bought the engine that allows a bunch of high resolution pictures to be displayed over the web.
The research to find common elements in pictures and from that the location where the picture was taken was a joint project between Microsoft and University of Washington. That was not purchased from a 3rd party.
Yep. I run Windows 2003 Server at work and it doesn't work on that either. I am pretty sure the Photosynth team wants it to run on more platforms. This is still a new product that is barely out of the research stage.
Microsoft also worked with the BBC to produce this collection of Photosynths of several well known places in Britain.
Fallout was also supposed to be GURPS computer adaptation, but "they" had a falling out with Steve Jackson games.
Limbic. Spam.
(with deep respects to Charles Strauss)
But what are electrolytes? Do you even know?
They Shall Walk
I messed up the URL. Sorry about that.
I really should learn to preview before posting.
There is a guy in WA working on that too.
They Shall Walk
Both LiftPort and TheyShallWalk have presented at the Seattle Robotics Society.
In the case of the camera enabled XBox Live service, Microsoft requires that there be no evidence of a cusomter using the service while wearing no pants.
Google will be slow to jump on the nanotech bandwagon lead by IBM. ...
Then IBM will be slow to jump on the quantum computing initiative lead by Microsoft.
Then Microsoft will be slow to jump on the computronium matrioshka shell started by Google.
and so it continues onwards toward the heat death of the universe.
The cancelled TV show is an economic fight. The network says, "this shows is not profitable to produce." The fans say, "Look at how many of us there are. Surely we are large enough in numbers to make this project worthwhile." It is a simple argument that is relatively easy to quantify.
Protests against the war go something like this:
P: "Stop the war! Bring our children back! We love them and miss them and don't want them to die!"
G: "Your children are doing their duty to serve their country. You should be proud of them."
P: "But this war is wrong. Innocent people are dieing."
G: "Those people are trying to kill us. We have to kill them first. Innocent casualties are regrettable but unavoidable."
P: "But the war was started on false pretenses. Those people aren't really trying to kill us."
G: "Our intelligence says they are. We have more information than you do and therefore more ability to make a correct decision."
Maybe the govenment is right. Maybe the protesters are right. It is much more difficult to tell.
One way in which it is similar is that businesses involved with the war are making a lot of money. Those businesses have a lot of influence in the government. We could try to argue to those businesses that they would make more money without the war than not, but we would be wrong.
And now I'm rambling and don't know what point I'm trying to make.
Only if that cancer patient has children afterwards. If they had children before then curing them or letting them die has no effect on the future gene pool.
And it isn't really devolution. That would imply that a species becomes less fit for its environment. Just because one feature that used to be useful is disappearing does not mean that the species as a whole isn't a better fit for its environment.
Are humans "less evolved" because we lost the ability to produce Vitamin-C or because we no longer have gills?
Ah... Manimal and Automan... brings back memories of my terribly misspent youth.
I think that was around the same time as "Otherworld" and "V: The Series".
This is how the robots will exterminate the human race.
By outcompeting us economically.
H1B's do depress wages. If the H1B's were not available, companies would pay more for skills in short supply, students would have more incentive to gain those skills, and the imbalance would be corrected. Using foreign labor to fill the gap allows companies to pay less (because supply is increased) and creates larger skill shortages in the future.
The government uses surveys to determine what "fair market wages" are for H1B's and enforces a salary floor. This has the effect of setting a ceiling for local workers. It is another story of government mucking with the free market and making it operate less efficiently (although one could certainly argue that in a real free market there would not be any restriction on foreign labor).
Still, it does help our economy to bring the best and brightest of other counties to work in this one. We just need to make sure there is a cost difference so that companies will only hire H1B's when it is truly necessary. How can the government determine the optimal number of foreign laborers to allow while providing an incentive for companies to hire local talent.
My proposal is to auction off the H1B slots. Hold a closed bid 2nd-price style auction. Every company that wants H1B workers will enter as many bids as they want at the price they are willing to pay for the slot. The top N bids all get H1B slots but they all pay the price of the N-1 bidder. After all of the bids are placed, the government would select N to maximize revenue. All of that money would go into the Federal budget and the companies that won would be free to fill their slot with whatever H1B person they wanted (they would still have to pay market wages for that person).
Wages for local talent would be driven up by the imbalance caused by the auction and new workers would have incentive to learn the in-demand skills. Companies get the top talent that they want. The government gets a new revenue stream. Everyone in this country wins.
Yes. I think it says you make reasonable interpretations.
Maybe they could have referenced the Eye of Sauron to make the title a little more misleading.
In downtown Austin they purposefully uncooridinate the traffic lights because they do not want downtown to be a throughfare. Instead they want slow traffic that makes the area pedestrian friendly so that businesses get more customers. Although the effect on me was that I never wanted to go downtown. Austin is weird.
Someone else mentioned that the specific likenesses can be copyrighted. I am pretty sure that Disney's names for the dwarves are original too.
Ah, I misunderstood your original intent. You were not saying there is a way to squeeze 8 digits into 2 bytes. You were saying you would have to squeeze 10 digits into two bytes and you are surprised one would be expected to know how to do that.
7 +10+10 is where I got the 27 bits from).
.5MB in RAM and represent each number in 4 bytes. Building a heap is average linear time. When the heap fills you write it to disk and start a new heap. Each heap will hold 131k numbers. With 1M numbers we will write 8 heaps to disk {A B C D E F G H}. Doing a merge sort on these heaps is a bit tricky.
I agree about the unexpected input part.
(incidently, log2(100000000)=log2(100)+log2(1000)+log2(1000)~=
I think you would have to implement some sort of paging system to do this. But once you start accessing the disk, efficiency goes out the window.
Suppose you made heaps around
We load two of the heaps on disk into memory and merge them into two new heaps. We only have to store one of the two new heaps in memory at a time. When the first heap fills up we just write it to disk and create a new heap. An obvious solution is to do O(N^2) merges:
((((((A+B)+C)+D)+E)+F)+G)+H) => [Min Ordered Set] + {7 partially ordered sets}
Repeat for the remaining seven incompletely ordered heaps and you are done.
I suspect we can do better than O(N^2) though. The problem is if we do something like this:
A+B => AB1, AB2
C+D => CD1, CD2
E+F => EF1, EF2
G+H => GH1, GH2
We know that all elements in AB1 are less than all elements in AB2, but we know nothing about the relationship between CD1 and AB2. We can't just merge AB1+CD1 and expect to get anything meaningful.
We do know that the root element on each heap is the smallest element in that heap. Since we only have 8 heaps we can store that in memory (the heaps probably have to shrink a little bit). We merge AB1 and CD1 into two heaps at once. Items that are less than AB2_min go into heap 1, items larger than AB2_min go into heap 2.
We have a new set of heaps now that are slightly better ordered. The item at the top of each heap is the smallest item in the heap. All of the items in XY1 are less than all of the items in XY2. We remember the minimum item in each of the XY2 heaps...
Crap, I just realized that is all too complicated. Just do a quick sort using pages. Create two pages each 512K in size. Choose a 9 digit number as the pivot. Assume over all time the numbers will be uniformly distributed so you choose 500000000. As each number comes in put it in heap one if it is less than the pivot and into heap 2 if it is greater than or equal to the pivot. As a page fills up then write it to disk and create a new page. In the end you will have 8-9 pages where one set of pages is less than the pivot and the other set is greater than or equal to the pivot. Start the process over, but instead of reading from the network, load a third page as your data source. Select the new pivot by sampling from the new set (which could be done during the initial processing) -- pick 10 or 20 numbers from the set and use the median as the new pivot. Worse case performance is O(N^2) but it will probably be closer to O(N*logN). Merge sort is usually guaranteed nlogn, and that is what I was trying initially, but I don't know if it will actually work with partially ordered sections like this.
Schlumberger is a fantastic company. Although the cancer rates in Houston are pretty bad.
Or maybe 8 digits into 4 bytes?
Technically, you only need 27 bits per phone number so you could squeeze 6 numbers into 10 bytes with only 2 bits of entropic waste, but that sounds like a pain to work with.